OpenAI Mock Interview Practice for Software Engineers

An OpenAI mock interview on Devana is a voice interview with an AI interviewer on one of 38 OpenAI-style questions from Devana's bank: 13 coding, 8 system design, 11 technical deep dives and 6 behavioral. Your code runs, the interviewer asks follow-ups, and you get a score out of 100. Company question sets are on the Free plan. Devana is not affiliated with OpenAI, and these are not leaked or confirmed OpenAI questions.

For the stages and their sources, read the OpenAI interview process.

What the OpenAI software engineer interview looks like

OpenAI publishes its process in an interview guide. It describes about a week for resume review, introductory calls with the hiring manager or a recruiter, one or more skills-based assessments that vary by team (pair coding, take-home projects or technical tests), final interviews of typically 4 to 6 hours with 4 to 6 people over 1 to 2 days, and a decision within a week of those. It calls this an example, and says yours may differ.

For engineering it says it generally looks for "well-designed solutions to the challenge, high-quality code, optimal performance, and good test coverage," and that it evaluates communication and collaboration. Expectations for AI tools vary by interview: some formats allow them and others assess you without them, and your preparation materials say which.

The full guide, with the sources, is the OpenAI software engineer interview process.

What Devana practices for OpenAI

Devana's OpenAI set has 38 questions, 23 of them rated hard. The topics that come up most are Machine Learning, Scalability, APIs and Systems Design. They are Devana's own questions, written to reflect what OpenAI and its candidates have said publicly about its interviews. Start any of these as a mock interview:

How to practice for OpenAI

• Write code you would stand behind. The coding set includes streaming tokens to a client that may disconnect and rate limiting by tokens rather than requests. Devana runs your code, so test it as you go and say what you are checking, since test coverage is on OpenAI's list.
• Know how models are served. The designs include an inference API for a large model, the training data pipeline and an evaluation platform. Estimate the load first, since a request's cost depends on its tokens as well as how many requests arrive.
• Be able to explain model behavior. The technical deep dives ask why a model gets slower as the conversation grows and what is happening when it confidently states something false. Answer as an engineer who has to fix it.
• Have stories about working without a map. The behavioral set asks about building something whose consequences you were unsure of, and working on something with no established practice. Keep each about what you personally decided.

How to set up an OpenAI mock interview

1. Open the OpenAI set. The "Start a free OpenAI mock interview" button opens Devana's question bank filtered to OpenAI.
2. Choose the round. Filter by type: coding, system design, technical deep dive or behavioral. A technical deep dive runs as a system design round, with a whiteboard.
3. Choose the level. Filter by difficulty: the company sets are rated medium or hard. 23 of the 38 OpenAI questions are rated hard. You can also filter by topic.
4. Start it. Press "Practice this question" and the voice interview starts on that question. Signed out, you are asked to sign in first; the Free plan needs no card.
5. Role and style. A question from a company set uses your saved interviewer style and coding language from Settings. To choose your role, such as frontend or backend, and run a full two-problem round, start a standard interview from Practice instead; that setup cannot be pointed at one company.

How an OpenAI mock interview runs on Devana

Pick a question from the OpenAI set and you talk it through with Josh, Devana's AI interviewer, for up to 30 minutes on a paid plan (45 for a design question) or 20 on the Free plan. In a coding question your code runs in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java or C++; a design question has a whiteboard the interviewer reads; a behavioral question gets follow-ups about what you personally did. Each session ends with a score out of 100 on that round's rubric and a list of what raised and lowered it. For a full-length round with two problems, start a standard mock interview from Practice instead: up to 60 minutes on a paid plan, though you cannot choose the company. The mock interviews by round page shows each round type.

Guides to study first

• Requirements and estimation, for sizing a model-serving design
• Load balancing and stateless services, for routing requests across model servers
• Message queues and async work, for streaming and batch work
• Caching, for repeated prompts and read-heavy paths
• Failure and mistakes, for what you learned when something went wrong
• Ownership, for decisions you made without a playbook

Devana is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by OpenAI. The questions are Devana's own and are not leaked or confirmed OpenAI interview questions.

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