Updated by Anthropic candidates
Infrastructure Software Engineer Interview Experience
Anthropic was very different from the 20 companies I interviewed with. The culture round felt like a lawyer call, very interrogative, with conscience based questions like when have you done something against your values, and after that round I was like, is it still worth it?
Interview process
I interviewed for an infrastructure software engineer role that was basically staff-scoped even though the title stayed generic. The process was a recruiter screen, a live coding phone screen, then two onsite loops: system design, coding, culture, and later experiences/goals plus a technical project deep dive. The phone screen was the only question I had seen before online. Everything else felt genuinely novel and very tied to GPU infrastructure and Anthropic's safety culture. The culture interview in particular was unusually interrogative, and they even warned me in advance that some questions might make me uncomfortable. I felt strongest in the project deep dive and weakest in the later coding round.
- Recruiter screen
- Phone interview
- Final round
Interview tips
I'd prep in two lanes. First, do the common Anthropic phone-screen coding question because that one really is out there. Second, don't expect the rest to come from a bank. I'd read their safety and AI security writing closely, have my own real opinions on it, and for staff-level coding and design I'd make sure I'm the one volunteering the edge cases before the interviewer has to feed them to me. I'd also expect novel infra questions around batching, GPUs, and operational tradeoffs, not textbook system design.
Company culture
I got the sense they're hiring for people who can handle novel infra problems and who genuinely buy into the safety mission. Compared with the 20 or so other companies I interviewed with, Anthropic was the most interrogative by far, especially on values and conscience. They seemed to care a lot about whether I'd push back if something felt wrong, not just whether I could execute. The process also felt pretty structured: I got handed from one recruiter to a more experienced one after the phone screen, references were only supposed to happen near offer stage, and they even talked comp bands before final leveling.
Questions asked
Overview
My first onsite loop had a system design round, another coding round, and a culture screen. The technical interviews felt very gotcha-driven in a practical way, like they already knew the hard edge cases from real infra work and wanted to see if I'd surface them myself. The culture round was the most distinctive part of the whole process because it felt unusually interrogative about mission, safety, and conscience.
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
When do you decide to flush a batch?
How do you figure out which GPU has capacity and which one should receive the next batch?
I proposed queueing requests and flushing either when I hit a batch-size threshold or a time threshold, then dequeueing that batch and sending it to a GPU. The harder follow-up was GPU selection. He kept drilling into how I'd know which GPU had capacity, so I suggested a GPU-aware load-balancing layer that tracks availability and routes work accordingly. It felt like a genuinely novel problem, and even he seemed to be thinking through the tradeoffs with me.
How would you handle cycles or an infinite loop?
How would you account for a long-running function that never returns?
The input was a stream of profiler samples with function start and end markers, and I had to infer enough structure to identify the slowest section. I had practiced a similar stack-sample problem before, but this version kept shifting. Once I had a solution path, he started breaking it with edge cases like cycles, infinite loops, and functions that never return. I think this was my weakest round because I wasn't proactively naming all those failure modes the way they'd expect at staff level.
Why Anthropic, and what did you take away from the safety and AI security material we sent you?
Do you really believe in the mission?
Would you act on your values or optimize for profitability?
Can you push back if something goes against your values?
Have you ever done something that felt against your values?
I came in having read the safety and AI security posts they had sent, so I talked through my interpretation of their mission and why they care so much about safe AI standards. After that it became a conscience-heavy discussion about values, pushback, and mission versus profitability. It honestly felt less like a normal behavioral and more like being grilled by legal. They had even warned me ahead of time that some questions might make me uncomfortable.
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