Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
Interviewed recently? Share your experience to try it free, or become a member for full access.
“The process was smooth and candidate friendly. The recruiter gave enough context about the rounds. I found the feedback received was at a very high level and not much details were shared specifically for the design round. ”
“About Why Anthropic. They seem to really care. The recruiter seemed like they were really busy to even talk to me. They got interested after we started speaking. One question on how I handled low performers. I wish I had prepared for recruiter screen. I thought it would be generic, but it was what decided the HM next round.”
“Interviewer were assessing for the role, They were looking for control plane experience. My experience is been with data plane and they were not interested with after then”
“The overall interview process consisted of a recruiter screen, a technical call with the hiring manager, a written narrative exercise, and a 5-round virtual loop focusing on System Design, People Management, Operational Excellence, Cross-Functional Leadership, and a Bar Raiser round, with each module heavily testing Amazon’s Leadership Principles using the STAR method. What went well was my ability to deliver structured, data-driven answers that dedicated most of the time to my direct actions as a leader while anchoring results in concrete business metrics. I successfully demonstrated core Leadership Principles like Customer Obsession and Hire and Develop the Best through explicit examples of team growth, performance management, and architecture trade-offs, effectively balancing high-level business strategy with technical depth during system design discussions. What didn’t go as well was my initial tendency to credit the team using "we" instead of "I," which required interviewers to interrupt and probe for my specific individual contributions. Additionally, I mismanaged pacing in one round by spending too much backstory time setting up an operational failure scenario, which left little time for long-term preventative fixes, and I initially got bogged down optimizing a single database schema during system design rather than outlining the full end-to-end architecture first”
“Coding question was not leetcode but it had lot of probing questions. I ended up not having sufficient time to complete it. The interviewer sounded positive like I would pass but I didn't”
“Some of the interviews are very formulaic. When they ask about management experience they first start by asking what is the largest org you've managed, and then all following questions are about that org. The largest org I had managed was at a bank which doesn't have the greatest parallels to draw from. If I had better understood the format I would have answered with the bank, but explicitly stated that it's not a good analogy lets talk about this slightly smaller org because it's closer to you guys. Instead, this conversation happened at the end.”
“It was a fas process and the recruiter was very nice and quick to answer. Recruiter had a good knowledge of how teams operate. Technical interview was with hiring manager, had to add a filter to an existing report in typescript. It was AI assisted.”
“I was surprised at the volume of questions in the management screen. I had previously intererviewed at Amazon 3-4 yrs ago and it was 3 or 4 questions. Half of these questions were behavioral and half were management framework/philosophical.”
“I have 2 technical screens and the bar for EM for system designs is very high. The recruiter communication was very good. However the process took very long. ”
Preview full access of other recent interview experiences
“The weirdest Anthropic round was the company values interview. It was almost like a therapy session, and honestly if you went to a therapist at some point, you will pass that round much more easily.”
“What was very unusual is they didn’t give me any tooling to draw the system design, so I just sketched it on a piece of paper and talked them through it, then we got into this oddly deep debate about whether hover-over history should count as a recommendation signal.”
