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Forward Deployed Engineer Interview Experience
The weirdest part was that the take home was basically the job. I had to build a semantic search setup over Amazon products for ChatGPT, then walk that same solution back to the team because that is basically what they work on.
Interview process
An OpenAI recruiter reached out to me directly, and the process was pretty focused compared to a normal SWE loop. The main pieces were a one-week take home, a live team discussion of that case study, and a separate AI-enabled coding screen that was basically an easy LeetCode problem. My take home was to build a semantic search setup over Amazon products for ChatGPT, and a lot of the evaluation seemed to come down to whether I could explain my decisions clearly and tie them back to customer needs. The coding round itself was not bad at all, but they still wanted me to speak to time complexity and memory. I made it to the onsite stage.
- Recruiter screen
- Take-home project
- Technical interview
- Final round
Interview rounds
2 questions across 4 rounds
Recruiter screen
Overview
An OpenAI recruiter reached out to me directly, gave me the rough process, and the big thing was that the loop centered on a take home plus a live coding screen rather than a bunch of generic rounds.
Question types asked
Take-home project
1 question
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