I applied, and did a normal recruiter screen followed by a coding phone screen. After I passed that, hiring paused for the team, and then time passed until a different recruiter picked me back up for a virtual onsite. My onsite was a coding round, a system design round, a hiring manager round, a culture round, and a one-person technical presentation. At the time the question bank was small enough that I basically knew the kinds of questions coming, but Anthropic was one of my first loops, so I wasn't as sharpened as I should have been. I got pretty close but didn't get the offer, and my read is that the system design round hurt me the most.
I interviewed for an infrastructure software engineer role that was basically staff-scoped even though the title stayed generic. The process was a recruiter screen, a live coding phone screen, then two onsite loops: system design, coding, culture, and later experiences/goals plus a technical project deep dive. The phone screen was the only question I had seen before online. Everything else felt genuinely novel and very tied to GPU infrastructure and Anthropic's safety culture. The culture interview in particular was unusually interrogative, and they even warned me in advance that some questions might make me uncomfortable. I felt strongest in the project deep dive and weakest in the later coding round.
The system design interview was a bit different than the typical ones, it asked me to review an existing design doc and give feedback.
Initially I was a bit uncertain, but was able to navigate the doc and point out a few issues, then it becomes a typical deep dive session on failure handling, overload protection.
The interview process went well. The recruiter was very responsive and supportive throughout the process. Had a recruiter screening call and an HM call. I am pretty sure that the HM did not like my profile, or there was no fit for the role.
The process was structured, thoughtful, and generally well run. The interviews felt focused on practical judgment, problem-solving, communication, and how I approach ambiguous technical and product situations. I appreciated that the conversations were substantive rather than purely checklist-based.
What went well was that I felt able to draw on real examples from my past work, especially around leading technical projects, working with customers, and making tradeoffs under uncertainty. The interviewers were engaged and asked good follow-ups, which made the discussions feel collaborative.
What was harder was that some parts required being very concise while still giving enough technical depth. In a few moments, I probably could have structured my answers more clearly upfront before going into details.
- Why do you want to work at Anthropic?
- Previous experiences
- Agent building exercise from scratch - making use of existing tools
