How an OpenAI Engineer Secured Her Job in Five Days

An OpenAI engineer discusses how the company recruited her from initial contact to a signed job offer within a single week.

In a recent 'AI Across Borders' podcast, Jerene Yang—who leads OpenAI's synthetic data generation team—described her interview journey as exceedingly swift, efficiently handled, and straightforward.

Jerene joined OpenAI's office in San Francisco during October of 2024. Prior to her role at OpenAI, she held a senior position at Google, where she spearheaded the Cloud Spanner initiative and managed vast database systems, as stated in her professional profile.

On a Monday, a recruiter approached Yang for a leadership position that perfectly matched her expertise. By the following day, she was in conversation with both the hiring manager and the technical lead.

By Wednesday, she was engaged in an in-depth interview that spanned from morning until evening. The job offer arrived on Thursday, and she promptly accepted it on Friday.

Yang emphasized a particularly significant stage of the interview process known as the 'technical deep dive,' which is also referred to as a 'research discussion' in more research-centric roles.

During this stage, candidates have the opportunity to delve into topics with researchers. Engineering candidates often present systems they have developed, articulate the challenges encountered, and clarify the reasoning behind their strategic choices.

This process also allows candidates to gauge the depth of knowledge and intellectual capabilities of the interviewers in their specialized topics, according to Yang.

In addition to technical skills, the ability critical for any OpenAI candidate is using time with brutal efficiency.

Given the multitude of projects progressing simultaneously, team members must concentrate solely on assignments where their contributions make the most impact, Yang explained.

Yang also advised that prospective employees should heavily utilize AI tools and consider ways to automate tasks.

According to OpenAI's interview documentation, the process typically involves résumé evaluation, discovery calls, skills evaluations, and finally, comprehensive interviews. These concluding interviews can last from four to six hours, either in a single day or split across two days.

OpenAI's interviews target the candidate's industry knowledge and push their abilities beyond usual confines, with a strong focus on problem-solving, effective communication, and teamwork.