Recently completed Anthropic overall interview process of SDE is quite different from that of other major companies. The amount of code is really large, especially the intersection of technical capabilities and social issues is deeply examined. Here is a complete interview experience for your reference.
Anthropic SDE full process review
Recruiter Call（30min）
This round of pure chat: past project experience, understanding of Anthropic, and why you want to come. The focus was on what “B Corp” means and how you understand Anthropic’s AI security mission (Constitutional AI, Claude’s values, etc.).
Tips: Read the official About page + Anthropic’s Blog in advance, especially the “Core Views on AI Safety” and B Corp certification content. Be sincere in your answers and don't endorse them.
Coding Challenge（60-90min）
This is the OA with the largest amount of code and the most urgent time I have ever seen.
- Form: Most people take a 90-minute CodeSignal take-home, mine takes 90 minutes; some positions take 60 minutes on-site.
- Topic: Banking System Simulation (Banking System)
- Supported functions (progressive layer by layer):
- Create Account
- Deposit
- Transfer
- Pay
- Merge accounts(Merge Accounts)
- Query transaction history (Transaction History)
- Cashback Calculate and issue
- Query Cashback status (Status)
- Check balance (Balance)
- All operations require thread safety/concurrency considerations (although it is not stated explicitly, there are hidden concurrency cases in the review)
- You need to design a reasonable data structure (Map + List / custom class) and handle edge cases (account does not exist, insufficient balance, circular transfer, historical record merging after merger, etc.).
- Supported functions (progressive layer by layer):
Hiring Manager Call
This round of technical exchange is mainly divided into two parts:
- Project explanation: In-depth discussion of past project experience, technology selection, implementation details and problems encountered. Interviewers like to explore candidates' ideas for solving problems, rather than simply asking about functional implementation.
- Code review: The interviewer will provide some code snippets written in different programming languages and ask to find problems, identify functions, optimize or point out potential bugs. This link examines sensitivity to code quality and multi-language capabilities.
It is recommended to prepare several familiar projects in advance, be able to review them with clear logic, and have your own opinions on code style, performance optimization, and maintainability.
Onsite
Onsite lasted four hours and was divided into four rounds.
The first round of Coding mainly tests algorithms and data structures, but it is closer to actual engineering than ordinary LeetCode; the second round of System Design asks some questions related to Anthropic's own products, such as how to make a single-threaded model serve multiple users at the same time, or the architecture of the Claude chat service;
The third round is Coding again, and the questions are more job-oriented, involving distributed consistency and caching; the last Behavioral round is different from traditional interviews, focusing on the impact of AI on ethics, data protection, security, and the job market. The pace of these four rounds is quite tight. It not only tests technology, but also values your thinking on AI and social issues.
Anthropic SDE exclusive Coding exam questions
Web Crawler
It is required to use Python to implement a web crawler. The core logic is essentially Breadth First Search (BFS) - starting from a seed URL, discover and crawl all links belonging to the same domain name.
The interviewer provided a Get_urls(url) Auxiliary function, which already handles the HTTP request and basic link parsing work, I don't need to care about the underlying web page crawling details. It is required to implement the synchronous version first, and then optimize it into a multi-threaded/asynchronous version after it runs normally.
Follow up:
- Optimization (multi-threaded implementation)
- Use
ThreadPoolExecutorAndUrlparseProcessing URLs - How to process a task as soon as it is ready
- Threads vs processes: differences and applicable scenarios
- Politeness policy (avoiding server overload)
- Distributed system design (handling millions of URLs)
- Detect and handle duplicate content under different URLs
LRU Cache
This question provides an implemented in-memory cache and asks for extensions on the basic functionality.
The first problem is not extension in the strict sense, but bug finding. As long as you quickly understand the basic functions of caching, you can quickly locate the problem with the step of generating cache keys.
The second problem is to implement persistent cache, which requires that data must not be lost after the cache crashes and is restarted. The core idea is to persist data to disk and recover all data from disk files after a cache crash and restart.
Follow up:CPU-intensive vs I/O-intensive: How to implement it in a distributed system?
Anthropic SDE interview review summary
In general, Anthropic's interview process not only requires you to be technically proficient, able to write code and do system design, but also pays special attention to whether you have your own independent thinking about AI ethics and social impact.
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祝大家都能顺利通过，早日拿到Anthropic的offer！
