OpenAI Software Engineer Interview Experience — Strong Coding, Closed Out as a Borderline Case After the Virtual Onsite

Overall, I just did my best (shrug).

Phone screen: Coding — "infection," 3/5. I got stuck on a bug on the third question and spent about 15 minutes debugging it.
System design: chess.
Interviewed on a Thursday, heard back that I passed by the following Monday.

Virtual Onsite: Coding — IP address, 3.5/5. I got to the IPv6 part of the question and was hunched over looking up how to write a BigInteger.
System design: cloud IDE.
Project deep dive.
Behavioral questions.

In the HR wrap-up, they told me coding and behavioral were strong, but the system design feedback came back a bit shallow (kind of surprising to me); the tech deep dive also seemed to get shallow feedback. They tried to console me by saying I was a borderline case.

Honestly, I think it still comes down to my background not being strong enough.

I'll take it.