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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Senior+ Performance / Infrastructure Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Screens and an Onsite Invitation
The process up to my onsite invitation was as follows. Recruiter: passed, then waited two days. Hiring manager screen: passed, then waited two days. Technical coding phone screen: passed, then waited nine days. Onsite: scheduled. The recruiter round was very formal at the beginning. They really probed why I wanted Anthropic and why I wanted to switch jobs now. After the recruiter seemed satisfied…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Half-Hour Recruiter Screen on AI Safety
I received an outreach email from a recruiter in August. I originally thought we would just chat briefly and then move forward to schedule the later interviews, but we ended up talking for about half an hour. The recruiter asked quite a few questions, including: "Why Anthropic?" "How does your previous experience relate to AI safety?" "Why do you think you are a fit for this position?" "How large…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — An Extra LRU Cache Round After Admitting I'd Seen the First One Before
Overall the questions weren't hard, but there was a lot of code to write. The phone screen was one coding round — they asked the file deduplication problem (Q2), done in Replit. The onsite ended up being 5 rounds total; it was originally supposed to be 4, and they added one more later: Round 1 (Coding): asked about the web crawler problem (Q1). The interviewer asked if I'd seen a similar question…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — HR Screen Loaded with AI Safety and Personal Morals Questions
Just finished my HR call with Anthropic. It was a referral from a colleague, but honestly my background doesn't match the JD that well, so overall I got the sense she hadn't decided yet whether to move me on to the technical interview. The official line was that they'd decide in one or two days. She asked me a bunch of questions: What does the team do You said you're a tech lead — what does your…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Community-Compiled Guide to the OA, Technical, and Values Rounds
Anthropic's SWE interview process breaks into three main parts: an online assessment (OA), one to two technical interviews, and a values/culture interview. This guide compiles experiences and community info from multiple candidates, in the hope that it helps people who are preparing. Timeline The whole process moves pretty slowly. Multiple candidates report gaps of 2-3 weeks between rounds. A typ…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Compilation on Culture, Practical Coding, and Timelines
A clarification: this is a compilation, not my own interview experience. The content comes from public interview reports on this forum, Blind, Glassdoor, and Interviewing. It took me quite a long time to organize. Anyone who's interviewed there is welcome to add information or corrections. There's a forum compilation of 25 posts with a very complete question list, so I won't repeat the questions…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Recruiter Screen About Level, Motivation, and Availability
The recruiter asked what level of position I was looking for. I was a little distracted at the beginning and misheard the question, thinking I was being asked about my current position at my company. The other questions were why I wanted to join Anthropic and when I would be available to begin interviewing. The rest of the call was an introduction to the interview process. I was told that a coord…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Rescheduled Telemetry Design Interview and Naming Variants
I'd spent a long time looking through interview reports and hadn't found anyone saying what the Data Infra system-design interview actually covered. I recently did it, so here's my experience. Getting this interview scheduled was rough. It was originally set for a Wednesday. On Tuesday evening, HR said my experience looked more data-related, so they'd have me do Data Infra system design instead o…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Serious 20-Minute AI Safety HR Screen
A former colleague referred me earlier, and recently a recruiter called me for an HR screen. The recruiter did not smile at all and gave no introduction. The first thing I was asked was: why Anthropic? Then came several more questions: Was there anything in a recent Anthropic interview, article, or news story that I agreed or disagreed with? Why was AI safety important to me? Had I genuinely prac…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Web Crawler Question Derailed by a Concurrency Stumble
Classic interview question: web crawler. You can also find this one on the usual practice-problem site. First single-threaded, then the follow-up was multi-threaded. Only need to consider pages under a single hostname. The extra piece compared to the practice-site version is that you need to handle the fragment — the #... part of the URL needs to be stripped. No need to worry about URL normalizat…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Web Crawler Question That Turned Into a Late Multithreading Push
Phone screen, and there's a problem on LeetCode that's almost identical to what they asked. Write a web crawler that only scrapes pages under the same hostname. The URL they gave me was for a real website (I think it might have been their CEO's blog?). The interview format was a bit different though — he didn't have me jump straight to writing multi-threaded code. You do it single-threaded first,…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — AI Safety Questions Before a Phone-Interview Invitation
After applying to more than a dozen roles, HR finally contacted me. They asked a lot of questions about AI safety and security. How is Anthropic different from other AI labs? What does AI safety mean to you? What will happen if AI is not properly used? Have you followed Anthropic's recent moves? What did we do right or wrong? Why do you want to work at Anthropic? What do you think are the biggest…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Call Stack Sampling and GPU Weight Distribution System Design
I interviewed this past Thursday. The first question was: given continuous call stack samples, generate timestamped function start/end events. While I was answering, the interviewer kept pushing back with follow-up questions, including things like: How do you compute the change between adjacent call stacks using the longest common prefix? Why do end events go from inside out, while start events g…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Distributed Coding, AI Safety, and Hardware Reasoning
The author describes four interviews for an infrastructure-oriented Anthropic role. Distributed coding covered mode and median computation using supplied messaging interfaces, with attention to partitioning and communication costs. A separate programming exercise converted sampled call stacks into function events and explored recursion and limited recent-history data. The culture discussion consi…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Full Onsite Loop, Rejected at the HM Round
It's a bit of a shame — I ended up getting rejected at the HM round. I think I went through a relatively new process: complete the full interview loop first, then do team match afterward. Phone Screen The question was File Deduplication. The whole conversation went smoothly and I didn't feel like there were any obvious issues. About an hour after the interview ended, I got notified that a Virtual…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — In-Memory Banking OA, Then a Surprise LLM Classifier Screen
After mass-applying online, HR reached out really fast — they basically sent the OA in the second week. The OA was pretty simple: design an in-memory banking system, four levels total. There's discussion of this question all over the forum. The first level was designing three functions: add account, pay, and deposit. The logic was simple — just define a dict to track accounts and balances. The se…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Messaging at 100 Million DAU and Gaps in My Design
The question was to design a simple text-messaging app, with a fairly clear scope: Only conversations between two people, no group chats. Text only, no images or videos. Web clients only, with no mobile push notifications to consider. 100 million DAU. Keep messages when the recipient is offline so they can be read after the recipient comes back online. The interviewer asked me to share my entire…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — OA, a Python LRU Cache Phone Screen, and Rejection After a Full Onsite
Posting my Anthropic interview from a while back. I felt like I nailed everything. The culture round and the hiring manager round also went okay. In the end I still didn't pass. It feels way too arbitrary. (Maybe my background just wasn't a great match — I was interviewing for a billing platform team, but I've never worked on payments.) OA - recipe manager Phone screen - coding Q2 - LRU cache, th…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Onsite Loop with a 1-on-1 Chat System Design, File Dedup Coding, and a Culture Round I Couldn't Read
The phone screen was Q1 image processing — using PIL to do grayscale, scale, and resize. The first step handled small images, the second step handled large images, and improving performance meant using ProcessPoolExecutor. The recruiter had mentioned beforehand that I should be comfortable with parallelism/concurrency, which was basically a hint. Time was a bit tight and the interviewer had to nu…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Perfect OA, Rejected at the ML Inference System Design Phone Screen
I bugged a former coworker for a referral, and then got rejected right at the phone screen. The round was a system design interview, a classic ML inference design question. I felt okay about it after the interview and don't know why I got rejected. There were a few points where I think I either matched what the interviewer wanted, or was way off. The interviewer gave basically no real-time feedba…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected After a Weak System Design Round
Phone screen: a file. Onsite: Coding: image processing. System design: prompt playground. This round was probably my weakest performance — I hadn't crammed on enough interview experiences beforehand, and I hadn't written much down in my own doc. On one or two questions I walked right into the interviewer's trap. Pay attention to some low-level details here — that's also something I hadn't taken v…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Reviewing and Improving Pull Requests with Claude Code
This new question had probably been in use for a few months. I was given an online VS Code environment and a site similar to GitHub. It contained four pull requests, and I was allowed to use Claude Code. The task had two parts. First, I needed to go through every pull request, explain the problem each one solved, and comment on each one. Second, I had to choose one pull request, improve it, and u…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Technical Screen on Designing a P2P Model Downloader
The question was about downloading a model. It went so-so, even though the question itself was actually the simplest version of it. The main issue was that download and upload shared a 10Gbps bandwidth cap — not sure if the interviewer just picked that number randomly. The main problem was that early on I spent a lot of time performing — working through and explaining the optimal algorithm. I'd a…
Interview experiences · Anthropic
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 + cult…