Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two-Day Onsite With System Design, Project Deep Dive, and Culture

Process

Recruiter call.

Phone screen (coding) — a question that had already shown up on this forum.

Phone screen with the hiring manager — again, a question already posted here.

Onsite: four rounds.

Onsite

Day one: two system design rounds, both domain specific, not much reference value since they're not the kind of thing that gets asked repeatedly on this forum.

Day two: project dive deep + culture. I talked until my mouth went dry.

Project dive deep

You present for 20 minutes yourself, then the rest of the time is discussion. You have to talk about a project you actually worked on — if you borrow someone else's idea, it's very easy to get stuck answering questions in the discussion. Basically, feed the requirements I mentioned above to AI and mock it a few times, that's enough. I originally thought prepping for this round would be easy, but I ended up spending a whole entire day just on the slides... Friendly tip: find someone to mock with, especially someone with no domain knowledge, and see whether you can explain your project's high-level business value and the domain-specific parts in an accessible way. These points need to be clear:

1. Why did you do this project
2. What role did you play — what was your contribution, were you the TL, or did you also write code
3. What technical trade-offs did you run into, or if there were two possible designs, why you picked one
4. What challenges or surprises came up
5. How do you measure success — what's the metric, what's the ROI
6. Retro: what did you learn, would you have done it differently if you started over. I think you can elevate the retro-learning stuff into some reusable pattern you can apply to future projects — that instantly elevates the presentation.

Culture

All questions straight from this forum, so as long as you prepare ahead of time you're fine. I'd recommend mocking a lot with Claude/GPT. This round really depends on the person — be yourself.