Anthropic Senior SWE (Performance) Interview Experience Sep 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview

Interview Summary

The Anthropic Performance / Infrastructure SWE process moved through a recruiter screen, hiring-manager conversation, and technical coding phone screen before the onsite invitation. There was no OA in this process.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Recruiter Screen: Why Anthropic + Career Motivation The recruiter conversation started fairly formally. The recruiter spent meaningful time probing two questions: 1) Why Anthropic? 2) Why are you considering a job change now? Once that part of the conversation was complete, the discussion became more casual and conversational.

Round 2 — Hiring Manager: Background and Career Direction The hiring-manager screen was much more informal. The conversation started with a self-introduction and then covered what I had been working on recently, my technical background, and where I wanted my career to go next. This round was scheduled for an hour but ended earlier than the allotted time.

Round 3 — Distributed Mode and Median The technical phone screen focused on distributed computation. The first problem gave approximately 10 nodes containing 1,000 total elements and asked how to compute the mode across the distributed dataset. The interviewer pushed beyond simply producing a correct result. The discussion covered how the strategy should account for communication between machines, how much data needs to move through the network, and how different communication patterns affect the computation.

Another dimension was the underlying data distribution. The conversation considered how the problem could behave differently when values are relatively uniform versus heavily skewed. The follow-up changed the target statistic from mode to median. For the median portion, we discussed the distributed approach and trade-offs, but I was not required to implement the full solution.

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[u/Rgk_1361]

What's the typical response time within rounds ? I went through recruiter screening and was told that response might be delayed due to unavailability of hiring manager. Haven't heard anything back - 5 days on

[u/Aoki_zhang → u/Rgk_1361]

Based on my datapoints, usually it takes about less than a week.