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 Onsite had been scheduled.

Virtual Onsite

Coding

The question was Stack Trace. We went pretty deep into it, and the interviewer asked a lot of follow-ups — more than what I'd seen in previous interview reports. I don't remember the specific questions too clearly anymore, but I felt like I did fairly well in this round.

System Design

The format was to review and improve a design doc that had problems in it. I personally felt like I didn't perform especially well in this one — it was probably the relatively weaker round in the whole loop.

Project Retrospective

Pretty standard, mainly centered on projects I'd worked on in the past — things like the hardest part of the project, how I solved problems, what tradeoffs I made, etc. Nothing too unexpected.

Culture Interview

Also fairly standard behavioral and culture-related questions. The conversation flowed well overall and I felt like it went well too.

Follow-up process

After the VO, the recruiter told me my culture signal wasn't strong enough, so they scheduled an extra culture interview. After that additional interview, I moved on to the Hiring Manager round.

I ended up getting a rejection after the HM round. I'm not entirely sure why — it might be that my background didn't fully match the direction of the HM's current team, or maybe the culture read (or something else) in the HM round didn't meet expectations. Still a bit of a letdown, since I'd made it all the way to the final stage of the process.

Overall experience

Overall, the interview experience was pretty good. Aside from the HM round, where I felt the interviewer had limited interest in my background and the conversation was relatively flat, all the other interviewers were friendly and the discussions were fairly in-depth. The recruiter and coordinator communicated efficiently too, and the whole process moved along quickly.