Anthropic 5 rounds done - culture is the wild card
Anthropic 5 rounds done - culture is the wild card
Result: Pending Number of Rounds: 5
Phone screen was on CodeSignal but opened as a Jupyter notebook. No autocomplete so worth practicing in that environment beforehand. Got the image processing question (Q1). Grayscale, scale, resize on small images then had to handle large images with ProcessPoolExecutor. Finished it.
Onsite was 5 rounds. Coding had concurrency follow-ups which fit the recruiter's hint about parallelism. System design was Q2 (Prompt Playground). Not traditional SD at all, just a Google Doc discussion about user flow, DB schema, sharing mechanics. Interviewer drove the pacing fast; easy to lose your structure if you're not writing down your own points.
Culture round was the one I can't read. Named a specific value, gave a real personal example, critiqued something about Anthropic's current approach. Not sure if it was the right answer. They seem to want actual critical thinking, not generic "I align with your mission" stuff.
HM and project retro were solid. Should hear back in a day or two. Fingers crossed.
Replies (6)
The 1-2 day turnaround is accurate in my experience. Hope you get good news.
Culture round at Anthropic is really hard to read. I've seen people who felt confident about it get rejected and people who felt uncertain pass.
Q2 Prompt Playground gets a lot of people because they come in prepped for whiteboards and diagrams and there's literally none of that.
I made the mistake of starting with diagrams for Q2. Interviewer kept asking 'what's the user flow' until I finally got the hint.
Thanks for the post! was all questions from hack2hire or how best did u prepare? i have 1 coming next week
How did you handle the 'what could Anthropic do better' question? That one makes me nervous every time I think about it.
I said their deployment pace is too cautious relative to capability advances and that it creates internal tension. Just gave an honest take.
What background are you coming from? ML side or pure SWE?
Pure SWE, 5 YOE, applying for an infra role.