Behavioral Questions by Theme

OpenAI says very little about how it runs its behavioral conversations. Most of the prep floating around recycles the generic software-engineer question bank you would find for any company. So read the wordings below as representative, not as a script an interviewer reads from. The themes hold up across the accounts that exist, even where the exact phrasing will not, and they fall straight out of the mission, the Charter, and the current values plus a "Why OpenAI."

The overview lesson lays out the mission, the four Charter principles, and the values. It also maps where the people signal lives: a substantive recruiter screen, a roughly 45-minute Leadership round with a senior manager, and a roughly 30-minute Collaboration round with a peer. This lesson assumes all of that and spends its time on the questions, with one pointer first. The current values are Humanity First, Act with Humility, Feel the AGI, and Ship Joy, with operating principles Find a Way, Creativity over Control, Update Quickly, and Intense Focus. The 2023 list ("Intense and scrappy," "Make something people love," "Team spirit") is dead, and quoting it as current marks your prep as stale; the overview explains why.

The OpenAI angle

One theme decides loops at OpenAI that has almost no analog elsewhere: how you think about building powerful AI. Nearly every loop probes it, from the recruiter through the Leadership round, and a generic "I find this stuff exciting" answer tells the panel you have not thought about it. The posture that holds is thoughtful, engineering-grounded concern: you take the risks seriously enough to design around them and you are still optimistic enough to ship. That is the "Feel the AGI" value stated in your own words. The two ways it goes wrong are symmetric, and the worked example further down shows both. Everything else on this page is table stakes; this is the part worth over-preparing.