Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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39 stories

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AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
May 2026

Passed HR Screen, Then the Role Was Cut

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In progressHR ScreenXP0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
May 2026

A Cold Coding Round, a Warm System Design Round, Then Rejected

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
May 2026

OA Take-home Then a File-Duplicate Phone Screen

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Technical ScreenXP0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Rejected After the HR Motivation Question

My process ended at the HR interview before I reached any technical interview. The recruiter asked why I wanted to choose Anthropic. After I answered, the recruiter's expression looked noncommittal. Sure enough, I received a rejection a few days later. I have ten years of experience and was interviewing for a technical role, so I was really frustrated that a poor answer to "Why Anthropic?" was en…

RejectedHR Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

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…

RejectedOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Two-Day Onsite, Likely Failed on System Design

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RejectedOnsitePremium0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

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…

RejectedOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Reported Mar 2026

Referral, Product-Focused System Design and an $850k Offer

A while back I landed a software engineer offer at Anthropic. Total compensation comes to about $850k USD. During prep I studied from online material and also did three mock interviews. The mocks mostly helped me feel steadier about system design, although the design round I got at Anthropic looked quite different from the typical format people practice. One thing I'd pass on: people generally in…

OfferOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

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…

RejectedOnsite1
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

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…

In progressOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Five Onsite Rounds, Including a Prompt-Playground System Design

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OnsiteXP0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Failed a One-Round Java Coding Screen

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

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…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

A Full Onsite Loop That Ended in Rejection

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

A Surprise Extra Round, Then a Downlevel to Senior

Overall the problems weren't hard, but there was a lot of code to write. The phone screen was one round of coding — they asked the file deduplication problem (Q2), done on Replit. The onsite (VO) had 5 rounds total — it was originally supposed to be 4, but they added one more afterward: Round 1, Coding: asked the web crawler question (Q1). The interviewer asked if I'd seen a similar problem befor…

OfferOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

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,…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

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…

Technical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Two-Part Phone Screen and a DIY Attention Algorithm on the Virtual Onsite

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RejectedOnsitePremium0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2025

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…

OfferOnsite0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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