Anthropic Senior+ Engineering Manager Interview Experience — Cut in the Management Style Round

I interviewed for an L6-7 EM role, in the pretrain org. The technical rounds were:

• project retrospective
• system design

There were 3 non-technical rounds:

• management style
• strategy and execution
• culture

The project retro was the only round with an actual engineering leader from the relevant area sitting in, and I felt like that one went pretty positively — they asked some pretty sharp questions.

The system design round was about adding a router between the inference server (with many backends) and the API service. The main things they cared about were traffic prioritization, the batching service, and query caching. Honestly some of it felt similar to OpenAI's GPU credit system — kind of like doing a system design for GPU credits. The questions were on the easier side, since the interviewer was an eng leader on the product side, so the technical discussion was pretty pleasant.

The management style round was all pretty vague/abstract stuff — mainly conflict resolution, dealing with a low performer, how to rank your current team members. I think my answer might have come across a bit biased on this one, and I got cut here.

Strategy and execution was also pretty standard stuff, e.g. how to deal with a missed deadline, etc.

The culture round was a bit awkward. I'd prepared for it, but when the interviewer asked me why I'd prefer Anthropic over OpenAI, I wasn't ready for that. It's a genuinely hard question to answer — it's tough to explain why you'd pick Anthropic without also throwing shade at OpenAI.

Overall the interview wasn't that hard. I'd already cleared offers from basically every other company I was interviewing with, so I can only say it's a bit of a shame — but this wasn't really my first choice to begin with anyway, so it ended up being a mutual decision not to go with them.