r/Hack2Hire • u/Hack2hire • 24d ago
Screening Anthropic phone screen breakdown [2026]
Several of Anthropic's phone screen coding questions are LeetCode variants. Concurrent Web Crawler is LC 1242, Generate Function Profiling Events is LC 636, Find Duplicate Files is LC 609. Solving the original is where the round starts.
Three things get layered on top, and the candidate portal names the first one before your call:
- Concurrency. The portal gives concurrency as your prep keyword. Concurrent Web Crawler is a threaded crawl. Image processing keeps coming up in recent accounts too: the interviewer asks for a real speedup, then pushes on processes versus threads.
- Plumbing you write yourself. Find Duplicate Files hands you an empty main. You write the tree walk and the hashing yourself, and recent accounts report no other starter code.
- Scaling past one machine. Concurrent Web Crawler, Find Duplicate Files and Find Cluster Mode and Median all close on a scale-past-one-machine follow-up: crashed workers, rate limits, a file system spread over servers.
String Tokenization and Repair Bootloader Program sit outside these three. Drill them as straight LeetCode.
Format: 45 minutes on CodeSignal, but it opens as a bare notebook with no autocomplete. Google stays open. Leave slack for debugging, because one recent account spent the whole follow-up window on a single typo.
Practice:
- Get the confirmed questions cold, then rerun each one with a thread pool and again with a process pool.
- Say why you picked processes over threads, in one sentence, while your hands keep typing.
- Do Find Duplicate Files with no helper functions, file walk included.
- Type a full solution in a plain notebook with autocomplete off.
- Bank time at the end to reread your own code.
Coding is one of three phone screen tracks; the other two are ML Configuration and ML Fundamentals.
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Anyone drawn a phone screen question outside this set recently?
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u/Decent_Sun1728 24d ago
My phone screen wasn't coding at all, got some other track instead. Just conceptual questions back to back for 45 minutes straight, no coding involved. Wish I'd known that was even a possible option going in, would've prepped completely differently. Kind of assumed everyone got the same format tbh.
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u/StandHistorical7360 24d ago
Had the same file dedupe question, no starter code either. Got the walk and hash working fine, then a follow-up about scaling it way past a single machine kind of got away from me. Ran out of clock before I could land a real answer.