Recently took a student to pass the Anthropic whole process of SDE interview lasted nearly three hours, from coding to system design to culture interview, the pace was compact but not overwhelming. The whole process lasted nearly three hours, from coding to system design to culture interview, the pace was tight but not overwhelming. The overall feeling I got is that the questions are not difficult, but they emphasize on thinking logic and communication clarity.
Round 1: Coding
Both questions in this round were on the side of engineering scenarios.
The first question is about Crawler.
The problem is to crawl all the links to pages under the same domain, starting from a starting URL. The requirement is to implement a crawler system that ensures that you don't repeat visits or get stuck in a loop.
I started with the idea: use BFS or DFS to traverse the structure of the page, while maintaining a visited collection to prevent repeated visits. The interviewer then asked, "If the number of pages is large, how would you speed it up?"
I mentioned the possibility of using multi-threaded or asynchronous tasks for concurrent crawling and controlling the rate dynamically in a queue.
The whole exchange was relatively smooth, and it felt like the interviewer wanted to see how I weigh complexity and stability.
The second question is Deduplicate Files.
Input a bunch of file paths and output which files have duplicate contents.
I first thought the most straightforward thing to do would be to hash the contents of the file, but the interviewer followed up with, "What if the file is huge?"
So I added the chunked hash and secondary verification scheme, and also mentioned the distributed idea when comparing files across servers.
At that time, I was once stuck in the middle of the second question, Programhelp assistants voice remind me to "first talk about the general program, and then optimization direction", I immediately changed the order, the interviewer obviously nodded in recognition.
Round 2: System Design
The questions in this round are all close to Anthropic's core business and are more difficult than expected.
The first question is to design the Inference API.
To implement a reasoning service that can support multiple models and versions.
I will speak in three steps:
- Front-end request to the API Gateway;
- Gateway routes to different model services;
- The backend allocates GPU resources through load balancing.
Then we discussed the details of cold start, model caching, and request timeout retries. The interviewer focused on "how to do multi-version management" and "how to deal with the problem of slow model loading".
The second question is Prompt Interactive Platform.
Similar to a smaller version of the Claude interface that lets the user talk to the model.
I mentioned session management, history, streaming output. The interviewer asked about token billing logic, and I added that I use log aggregation and statistics to do billing analysis.
The third question is Batch Service.
The topic requires the design of a batch task processing system.
I talked about the flow of the API receiving a task → saving it to a queue → worker consuming the execution → storing the result.
When talking about the failure retry mechanism, I added the dead letter queue (DLQ) handling scheme.
This round was relatively smooth overall, but I spoke too quickly at the beginning, and Programhelp reminded me to "summarize the objectives in one sentence", so I reorganized my opening to make my logic clearer.
Third round: Culture / HM interview
The last round is the Hiring Manager interview, which is mainly about culture matching.
Questions include:
- "Was there ever a time when you sacrificed development speed for system security?"
- "How do you see the balance between security and innovation?"
I used an example from my own previous project to talk about how I proactively do a rollback mechanism in my production environment to avoid potential risks.
Programhelp prepared a STAR template for me in advance, and I answered according to that logic, with natural and focused language.
Summarize
Anthropic's interview questions are overall not fancy, and test your ability to articulate technical issues, structured system design, and your attitude towards security and collaboration.
If you prepare only by brushing up on the questions, you may find them "vague"; however, if you familiarize yourself with the real engineering environment, you will find that they are actually very representative.
Programhelp's mock and voice assistance helped me a lot to play steadily this time, especially in the system design and behavioral aspects, reminding me in real time how to adjust the order of expression and make up the key points.
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