Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“The interviews are easy/medium difficulty for an experienced engineer. The first coding round includes Java-related questions before moving on to an easy LeetCode-style problem. There is no virtual onsite; candidates are required to go to the office in San Francisco, and there are four rounds in total. The interviews are very friendly and feature relatively easy-to-solve problems.”
“The process was good but thorough. They were very responsive and punctual. The coding questions were easy, but can be hard under pressure.”
“Interviews are conducted well, the first coding round is only the elimination round. The position was filled while I was being interviewed and my application did not move forward even though I did well in all the interviews.”
“I think I did pretty decently overall, though I felt there was definitely room for improvement. The technical questions were very appropriate for an Entry Level SWE role, and you could arrive at coherent answers by practicing the 150 Neetcode questions, and using proper application from DSA classes. Though the hiring manager interview at the end was stranger, as it focused more on just general problem solving / knowledge questions as opposed to a full-on behavioural. The behavioural questions I felt I could've done better, mostly because I was unprepared for it and should have spent more time making my responses more coherent. ”
“The overall interview process went smoothly. My recruiter was friendly and communicative, and flexible with my schedule (I was traveling and had to split up my interviews). I received feedback relatively quickly after each round (within a few days - I often had to wait longer with other companies). No surprises, the recruiter clearly described the type of interview for each round.”
“Behavioral and Technical rounds were very friendly and relaxed. The last round was very intense and a technical deep dive into software engineering fundamentals like design patterns, code quality evaluation, etc.”
“Overall interview process was fairly standard. Coding questions were similar to the previous interview experiences. Make sure to be fluent with file system APIs (reading and writing data within files). System design questions were fairly standard questions.”
“The OA was more challenging than I expected, the questions were more aligned with Competitive programming style. Recruiter was really supportive and informative. Still waiting on the next steps, which is the final round.”
“Started with background discussion. Interviewer asked about a specific project i mentioned on the resume and dug into details. As for the coding challenge, I was given an existing package which contained an API for reading 4 bytes of data at a type from a file. To read 10 bytes, we had to call this underlying API 3 times to get 12 bytes, respond back with the requested 10 bytes, and keep the extra 2 bytes of data in memory for future calls. I solved this with a queue-based implementation, handling edge cases around reaching the end of the file. Got follow-up questions related to handling API call failures, retries, and streaming the output.”
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“The weirdest Anthropic round was the company values interview. It was almost like a therapy session, and honestly if you went to a therapist at some point, you will pass that round much more easily.”
“What was very unusual is they didn’t give me any tooling to draw the system design, so I just sketched it on a piece of paper and talked them through it, then we got into this oddly deep debate about whether hover-over history should count as a recommendation signal.”
