I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Anthropic (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2025
Interview
Recruiter call, 60 minute technical screen, hiring manager call, then on-site loop with more coding and some behavioral. I did not make it past the tech screen.
Tech screen was a pre-made coding problem in Google Colab and was different from what the recruiter had prepped me for. I was told it was a practical, non-leetcode style coding exercise in my chosen environment and language, would involve concurrency/multithreading, and communication with the interviewer would be most important. My interviewer sent me a premade Colab notebook with a problem to convert nested stack traces into discrete start and end events, with a small amount of explanation from the interviewer at the beginning. There was no concurrency involved and it seemed like they perhaps expected a solution using recursion. There was very little feedback or guidance given throughout - the interviewer seemed either inexperienced/unprepared in interviewing or very disengaged and uninterested in doing a technical screen. The interviewer asked no questions of me at any point beyond adding a specific edge case, and at the end I had to ask them about what they did at Anthropic, which team, how long they'd been there, etc as there was no time given for introductions. They were not from the team I was interviewing for, and didn't seem familiar with that team.
Not the worst tech screen I've done, but overall sub-par and disappointing for a company trying to recruit experienced talent. Clearly there was a disconnect between recruiting and engineering on which tech screen they're giving candidates as it appears they have a few different ones, and the folks doing the interviewing need some training on leading effective interviews.
Also note that Anthropic as a policy will not provide any feedback on the interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of samples that each contain a list of function names, generate start and end events for each function across the list of samples.
It was a very tough experience. I had a recruiter screen, and one of the main questions the recruiter asked me was why I wanted to join Anthropic. I tried to answer honestly, but in retrospect, I don’t think my response came across as strong, specific, or sincere enough. Shortly after the interview, I received a rejection, which made me feel like that answer may have been a key reason things did not move forward. It was disappointing, especially because I was genuinely interested in the company and the role, but I also see it as a learning experience. Going forward, I want to be much more thoughtful and prepared when explaining not just why I am interested in a company, but why that company’s mission, work, and values genuinely resonate with me.
Given images and list of functions, apply those on the images. like transform, rotate, greyscale etc. it was very easy but needed e2e coding to complete it. Interviewer was interactive, kept going level by level adding layers of complexity.
I applied online. I interviewed at Anthropic in Dec 2025
Interview
Applied online and was sent an automated email asking me to complete an online assessment. As part of the online assessment, the software used generates test cases in a read-only file. You have to pass all of the tests in order to progress to the next level. I passed 2/4 levels quickly but for the 3rd level, the read-only test cases failed to build. I was using Golang and the test case (clearly generated by AI) had code for "variable := []undefined{}" which is not valid Golang. There was no way for me to edit this test code since it was read-only and provided by the platform. I reported this feedback to the platform itself but because I was never contacted by a recruiter, I could not tell Anthropic that the platform had an error that prevented me from completing the assignment. As a result, I received a low score on the assessment (since there was no way to pass the level if the test code did not build) and I received an rejection from Anthropic a few days later from a no-reply email. This was a really frustrating experience.
