Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
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“Practical interviews, focussed on the role requirements. System design had unique twists, but nothing too out there.”
“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. ”
“The process went well. The screening round itself has two interviews: the behavioral one and the technical one. I didn't do well on the technical one, so the behavioral one was very much a formality, and it was very clear that the person had seen the feedback. ”
“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 interviewers were prepared, were all very nice except for one of them. I think by the last round during the onsite they probably made up their mind on not to hire me, I got the feeling. If they had decided that, I think it's better to not waster both their time and mine. ”
“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.”
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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.”
