Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected After a Weak System Design Round
Company: Anthropic
Role: Software Engineer
Round: Onsite
Seniority: General
Outcome: Rejected
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 very seriously before.
- Culture: one question asked whether you've ever really been so off — something you insisted on that turned out to be wrong.
- Project deep dive: the interviewer didn't push hard on details, just asked who decided on the business metric.
Thinking back on it, I think it was the system design round that I didn't nail.
A week after the break, I got the rejection.
Feels like this puts a period on my 2026 job search.
Update (2026-08-04 03:58 +08:00): HR hinted that next time they'd take a deeper look at the materials I'd sent before. GG HF.