Two working days after my referral, a recruiter contacted me. I interviewed for a senior SWE role.
Step one was the OA. The problem was a bank system. I had prepared for it ahead of time, so I just had the answer memorized, and I got a perfect score. I heard it's best to get a perfect score.
Recruiter call: they ask why Anthropic and what you think about AI safety.
Phone screen coding: cat image processing. I did two parts. The problem already specified that you must use Pillow as the image library, and they gave me the call syntax for each Pillow transform. Part 2 was how to optimize the running time. I used multiprocessing, and the interviewer asked why I chose multiprocessing instead of multithreading, and also had me think about how many workers the process pool needs. I got both parts running and passing the tests, and the tests show the total time to run through all the images.
It was originally pool hire, but the onsite loop I was scheduled for after the phone screen already includes a hiring manager round, so I think I got matched with a team.
Onsite:
System design: a prompt playground. Same as the other writeups, after I finished the basic database schema the interviewer proactively asked how to handle large prompts and a share feature. For large prompts, I also had to consider the case where the user edits a large prompt and only adds one or two characters each time, and how storage should handle that. I proposed storing deltas, and then we had to think about where to store the deltas (for example object storage or a database) and I gave a few options with tradeoffs. The interviewer seemed to have a series of questions he wanted me to go through. Every time I finished answering one follow-up he would cut me off from going deeper so I could move on to the next one.
Coding: LRU cache, two parts. The first was generating a key for a function and its arguments, and the second was recovering the cache from a crash. I gave a WAL approach, but what was actually asked differed from the hack2hire version, because the interviewer gave a file_path and I had to open the file and write to disk on every log append. I'm not familiar with how to do delimiters in Python, and I agonized for a long time over how to partition the log so that I could split it correctly when reading the file back. In the end the interviewer reminded me I could use a newline delimiter. I'd suggest thinking this issue through carefully and coming up with a reasonable scheme. I ran out of time before I could debug everything, and the test cases hadn't passed when time ran out. The interviewer was very nice and gave me time to keep writing until the last moment.
Project deep dive: the prompt from the recruiter already spells out what you need to cover. It was very standard, half the time presenting and half the time answering questions.
Culture: it was all the usual questions for this company. My feeling is they want to see someone with critical thinking who is honest, who has their own values and sticks to them but isn't stubborn, and who listens to advice and corrects mistakes. The stories you tell should ideally show that attitude.
Hiring manager: standard behavioral questions, and they gave me time to ask about the team.
After two working days I followed up, and the recruiter said they were starting reference checks. Hoping for good luck.
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