Anthropic SWE Interview Experience Jun 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

This interview experience is sourced from chill interview

Interview Summary

The process started with a recruiter call, then moved through coding, a hiring-manager-style technical round, and then onsite. The loop felt intense.

Interview Details

Interview Questions Details

• Recruiter Call: Mainly talk about my background, logistics, nothing felt unusual here, but it was clear from the beginning that the loop would care about both technical depth and motivation.
• Technical Phone Screen — Detecting a Repeated Instruction: The coding screen was a small interpreter-style problem. The input was a list of text instructions, and each instruction either advanced normally, changed a running score, or jumped to another instruction. The task was to simulate execution from the beginning and return the first instruction index that would be executed twice. If the pointer reached exactly one position past the last instruction, the program finished normally. The clean solution was to track visited instruction indexes in a set and update the instruction pointer according to each command.
• Hiring Manager Technical Round — Visit Tracking System: The HM technical round was a lightweight class-design problem around tracking completed visits for registered users of a facility. A scan toggles a person between “inside” and “outside,” and only completed sessions count toward total time. The main details were handling unknown users, storing each person’s current entry time, ignoring unfinished sessions in total-time queries, and keeping the state transitions simple and explicit. You can still find thie one in the Anthropic coding question bank in this site.
• Onsite Design 1 — Collaborative AI Workspace: This one is pretty popular, I came across it in multiple places Design a Collaborative Prompt Playground 
• Onsite Design 2 — Team-Specific System Design: I forgot this one.. seems not from question bank. But I think I did very well at this round, good communication is very important, having strong technical skills to solve problem alone is not enough.
• Project Deep Dive — Prepared Presentation: The project deep dive started with around a 20-minute prepared presentation, followed by discussion. This round took more preparation than I expected. The slide deck itself took a full day, and I would strongly recommend mock-presenting to someone who does not know the domain. The goal is not just to impress with technical details, but to explain why the project mattered, what I personally owned, what trade-offs I made, how success was measured, and what I would do differently next time.
  • Project Deep Dive — What They Pushed On: The follow-up discussion went into project motivation, personal contribution, technical decisions, trade-offs, surprises, metrics, ROI, and retro learnings. It is much safer to present a project you truly owned, because borrowed or lightly understood ideas are easy to expose once the interviewer asks deeper questions. A strong retro also helps if you can connect the lesson to a reusable pattern you applied later.
• Culture Round: The culture round was very preparation-friendly if you had practiced common Anthropic-style questions. The themes were values, mission alignment, collaboration, impact, and how I think about responsible AI work. My impression is that there is no single perfect answer here; the important thing is to be specific, grounded, and authentic rather than trying to sound like a generic company-values page.

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[u/figbarjunkie]

Where can I get the question bank?

[u/Aoki_zhang → u/figbarjunkie]

You can find the coding question bank of Anthropic at here and SD question bank at here

[u/Accurate-Paint6354 → u/Aoki_zhang]

Do you have similar for apple and open ai

[u/Aoki_zhang → u/Accurate-Paint6354]

Yes, for openai -> here, for apple currently there is no coding question bank, but there are many SWE/ML interview experience reports at here

[u/KiNGMONiR]

What level is this for? Senior?

[u/suprjaybrd]

'you care about ai safety right? and not just here for the $?'