Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“The process was well-structured and moved at a good pace, with clear communication about next steps at each stage. What went well: the conversations felt genuinely two-way — I was able to ask real questions and get thoughtful answers, and the interviewers seemed interested in how I think rather than just checking boxes. ”
“few stages: an initial recruiter conversation, a technical screening, and then a set of onsite or virtual interviews. The technical rounds typically cover coding/DSA, system design, and behavioral or leadership-oriented questions. For a Senior role, I’d expect system design and demonstrating technical leadership to carry significant weight. I’d also prepare for Googleyness/culture-related questions”
“The difficulty was not in the technical, but in the behavioral questions. It seemed like there was a hidden rubric beyond the basics of getting things done that were not necessarily apparent at first glance. Perhaps the role of the FDE is to take in social cues and have an instinct with human interaction that they're judging for here. It seems like they really deeply care about why you want to join the company and the team. It's not really something you can cosplay because they will drill you with different questions from multiple interviewers. I love Stripe as a product isn't going to suffice. Perhaps read their blogs and other online resources about the company culture. They seem to highly value people who work autonomously to scope, design, implement, and deploy solutions while also doing a bit of project management for the parts of projects that do require more resources.”
“Interviewer was very friendly. Very easy first coding round. You should just brush up on leetcode and identify the patterns.”
“The overall process was structured and professional, with a mix of coding, technical discussion, and behavioral questions based on Amazon Leadership Principles. The interviewers were clear and gave me space to explain my reasoning. I felt strongest when discussing my past experience, system decisions, and behavioral examples. The main area I could have handled better was time management during coding.I spent too much time thinking through some details instead of communicating my approach and iterating quickly. Overall, it was a good learning experience and helped me identify where to improve for future interviews.”
“interview process is very lengthy took around 5 weeks, and expectations is very high in each round, for LLD working code is required, also dont mess your HM round since i felt like it contained more weightage ”
“The first round was recruiter screening via phone call, it went well. Then a zoom call with the principal software engineer, that went well too. Then came the 4 round loop. I messed up during the system design, as the structure for that round was completely different from what was described. The rest went well. But yeah didn make it”
“The process was confusing and leaned more towards DSA than I was expecting. It was basically trying to figure out a deduplication using hashsets.”
“The recruiter did a good job of giving me an idea of what to expect. Honestly, I didn't practice enough mocks by the time the interview came around. I liked that they had a portal for viewing the application process but I got no notification at all about my rejection.”
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“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.”
