Recently many of my friends have been asking Anthropic The interview process, especially the VO session, is difficult or not. As a company focusing on AI security and big models, their interviews do have their own characteristics: not only examining basic coding, but also valuing system design, and also asking questions related to AI values. Today, I'd like to share a student's Anthropic VO interview experience, restore the process of doing the questions and cardinal points, and hope to help you take less detours.
Interview Process Overview
Anthropic's VO sessions typically consist of the following components:
- Coding Challenge: Algorithmic questions or code modifications of moderate difficulty, favoring details.
- System Design / AI Related Design: Examining scalability, real-time processing, and architectural tradeoffs.
- Behavioral Questions: Value teamwork, communication skills, and especially knowledge of AI security.
The whole VO is about 45-60 minutes, and the interviewer will keep asking questions based on your answers, so you need to be solid in expressing your thoughts and handling details.
Trainee VO The process of doing questions is restored
I. Coding Challenge
The first question is Group Anagrams.
The trainee's thought process at the beginning was to use HashMap The result is that halfway through the writing process, I realized that the list can not be used as a dictionary key, and I got stuck on the spot. After calmly adjusting and changing to tuple, I was able to get through the basic case.
However, the efficiency is still not high, Programhelp's voice prompt reminds him: "In fact, you can directly use the sorted string as the key, it will be faster." Once the code was changed, the logic was instantly clear.
The second question is Merge Intervals.
The idea is intuitive: first sort and then merge. After the code was written, the interviewer followed up with, "What about empty inputs? What if there is only one interval?" The trainee did not deal with the beginning, almost missed the boundary case, but fortunately the remote prompt reminded him to add empty input judgment, successfully passed.
Wrap-up: The Coding section is not about the difficulty of the questions themselves, but about the boundary conditions and the clarity of the code presentation.
II. System Design
The title is. Real-time Transaction Monitoring System.
Asked to design a system to detect suspicious transactions in real time and the interviewer kept adding conditions:
- Can it hold up with hundreds of thousands of transactions per second?
- What about latency for multinational users?
- If the transaction data is to be archived, is it still guaranteed to be real-time?
The trainee only thought of writing rule detection with a database at first and got stuck when asked about concurrency.
Programhelp reminded him to consider message queuing + streaming processing, so he proposed Kafka + Spark/Flink, and added sharding in different regions to reduce latency.
When the interviewer heard this, he was clearly more interested and continued to discuss scalability. Throughout the process, the participants gradually elevated their thinking from "stand-alone database" to "distributed real-time architecture", which is exactly the kind of thinking process Anthropic wants to see.
III. Behavioral Questions
The interviewer's question was, "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate."
The trainee spends a lot of time talking about the background at the beginning and almost misses the point.Programhelp Timely Tip: Use the STAR frameworkWrap up.
So he reorganized:
- Situation: When doing a data pipeline project, the team is divided on the choice of tools;
- Task: I need to find solutions that meet the needs of the go-live and are acceptable to everyone;
- Action: I took the initiative to have a small meeting to compare the two options and do a test;
- Result: A compromise was ultimately chosen to save 30% costs.
The answer was succinct and strong, and the results were immediately much better.
Summarize
Anthropic's VO's gave the impression that the questions weren't necessarily the toughest, but they were very detailed, with Coding sessions testing you on boundary handling, System Design on scalability and architectural tradeoffs, and Behavioral on communication and values fit.
The biggest challenge for the participants was actually the little snags under the tension: inappropriate data structures, forgotten boundary conditions, too "stand-alone" thinking, too verbose answers. Each time, they were able to make timely adjustments because of the simulations and remote prompts in advance.
Still toughing it out on your own?
Many students will encounter similar stuck points at the VO session: ignoring details when writing code, System Design not thinking about distributed solutions, and Behavioral talking too much. To solve these problems, simulation + instant feedback is the most effective way.
Programhelp The team offers:
- Real-time voice assistance: When you get stuck, the instructor gently reminds the direction and helps you sort out the logic;
- Full Process Simulation VO: Coding, System Design, and Behavioral are fully covered to get used to the pace of interviews in advance;
- Behavioral Surface Answer Guide: Help you organize your resume and experience into a clear STAR story.
The team tutors come from Oxford, Princeton, Peking University and other top institutions, also have experience in Amazon, Google, Ali and other big factories, tutoring professional and reliable.
If you want to be more fluid and confident in your VO, doing targeted training ahead of time can really save you a lot of headaches.
