Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Guide

Anthropic Software Engineers work on the infrastructure, software, and UI of some of the most popular AI tools and products in the world.

They have reported 18.9 million monthly active users of their AI tools and products.

The crux of their interview process, the most common reason candidates fail is their culture fit round, based on AI ethics and safety.

Below, we break down the complete software engineer interview process at Anthropic for junior and senior candidates.

We created this guide with direct input from Anthropic Software Engineers. It reflects current interview practices and evaluation criteria used by Anthropic hiring teams.

Interview process

Anthropic’s Software Engineer interview process goes through the following stages:

Recruiter screen(s): 30-minute call(s) with a recruiter covering your background and interest in the role
Technical phone screen: 60-minute remote assessment of technical skill using Replit or Codesignal
Onsite loop 1: 2-3 interviews, 60 minutes each, covering system design, culture fit, and technical skill
On-site loop 2: 2-3 60-minute interviews on experience, behavioral topics, and values

The screening stages will be completed remotely, but candidates have reported the other loops being either in person at Anthropic’s offices or remote, depending on the role and the candidate’s current location.

We created this guide with direct input from Anthropic's software engineers. It reflects current interview practices and evaluation criteria used by Anthropic hiring teams.

Recruiter screen(s)

This is a high-level 30-minute discussion about the role, your expectations, and about Anthropic in general. The recruiter will ask about your experience and goals as an SWE, and will also touch on Anthropic’s approach, culture, and values.

This stage may be split into two calls, one with a second recruiter, who will discuss the remuneration options available to you and will share documents and resources about Anthropic for you to study before the interview loops.

Recruiter Interview Questions:

Tell me about yourself

Why do you want to work at Anthropic?

Technical phone screen

In this 60-minute stage, Anthropic will use a coding environment like CodeSignal or Replit and give you a multi-tiered problem. The initial problem will be fairly straightforward, but they typically add more complex steps as the screen progresses.

For example, you might be tasked with building a web crawler that crawls a small website. Once this is complete, they would ask you to make the crawler multi-threaded so it can crawl pages in parallel, and then ask you to create a dictionary of the crawled data based on specific characteristics.

Technical Phone Screen Interview Questions:

Design a web crawler

Write a function that converts stack samples into a trace

Design a key-value store

Onsite loop 1

The onsite rounds may be in person, or they may be a “virtual onsite”. The loops are scheduled on separate days, and the second loop will be cancelled if you do not pass loop 1. The rounds are 60 minutes each.

System design

Anthropic’s system design questions are focused on LLM tools and infrastructure, but also require you to demonstrate an understanding of building distributed systems that can scale to handle potentially millions of users.

They ask novel questions that directly relate to the team’s responsibilities and may currently be the focus of the team’s work.

For example, they might ask you to build a system that can handle a large volume of queries while optimizing GPU usage. Much like the coding assessment, the interviewer will continually ask questions and adjust parameters to test your understanding of the scale.

They might ask which method you would use to shard the system to balance computational load effectively, how you would handle hotspots, and how your system would change as usage in other regions increases.

Because AI and LLMs are a relatively new field with significant infrastructure demands, demonstrating that you can wring optimal performance from a distributed system is key.

System Design Interview Questions:

Design a file cache system

Design an agentic AI system that can autonomously adapt to new tasks

Design a scalable system for a token-generation service used by an LLM that needs to handle up to 100,000 requests per second

Design a batch inferencing API

Build a system to batch queries and optimize GPU usage

Coding

The coding interview will start with a straightforward question that the interviewer will build on by giving you new, more challenging parameters or introducing potentially code-breaking edge cases, and assessing how you manage them.

This method of starting small and then escalating the difficulty typically makes these interviews more conversational, rather than being focused solely on results. They might ask you to write a function to determine which uses stack trace samples to determine which function in a stack takes the longest to run.

Once you’ve written this code, the interviewer might say that one of the functions runs on an infinite loop, and you need to break down the samples to determine which function needs attention.

Anthropic favors using real-world problems for these assessments, and so you should expect to have to talk about why you chose a particular method, what the tradeoffs of your approach might be, and other considerations.

Coding Interview Questions:

Write a function that determines the longest-running function based on stack trace samples

Write a function that can read and eliminate duplicate files

Implement a function to justify a list of words within a given width

Write functions to serialize and deserialize a list of strings

Culture

One of Anthropic’s key differentiators in the AI space is its culture and outward-facing values, which place a major emphasis on transparency, data security, user trust, and ethical accountability.

Their questions reflect this, and they frontload these considerations by having recruiters distribute culture and values documents early in the interview process for you to study.

This can be a challenging round, as the interviewer will want you to speak candidly about difficult subjects, such as how you apply your ethics and values in the workplace, how you think about risks and potential downsides of AI and LLMs, and how you handle feedback and cross-team collaboration.

Many of the questions focus on the negative, such as asking you whether you have any concerns or critiques of Anthropic’s values or direction, which can put candidates in a difficult spot as they try to ‘thread the needle’ between candor and overcriticism.

It’s important to show that your experience and knowledge have given you a complete picture of the benefits and downsides of AI, and that you favor a methodical, thoughtful, and responsible approach to AI adoption, rather than one that ignores risks and downsides.

Culture Interview Questions:

Tell me about a time when you received negative feedback and how you handled it

What are the ethical risks of deploying agentic AI systems in high-stakes environments?

How do you keep users’ data safe and private when building AI systems?

Onsite loop 2

Experiences and goals

This interview will be handled by someone at the manager level or above and will feel like a continuation of the cultural round, with more of a focus on your experiences as a team member, collaborator, and leader.

Much like the prior interview, the questions will prompt you to speak candidly about your approach to tasks, to cross-team collaboration, conflict resolution, and your preferred team composition and style.

They may also focus on the negative aspects of your experience, with the interviewer asking you to describe strategies and organizational approaches that you found difficult or limiting. They’ll want to hear about times when you had a conflict with someone, or when you had to give or receive some challenging feedback.

Anthropic’s stated approach to team building focuses on trust and thoughtfulness, even in conflict and other challenging aspects of collaboration. Speaking candidly about past experiences, even difficult ones, is good, but you’ll also need to show that you can handle these moments thoughtfully and without ego.

Experiences and Goals Questions:

Tell me about a time when you faced a conflict while on a team

Describe an experience working in a cross-functional team

How do you deal with ambiguous situations?

Tell me about a time the business problem wasn’t clearly defined. How did you handle it?

Tell me about a time you made a bold and difficult decision

Technical project deep dive

As part of your interview preparations, you will be asked to prepare a presentation on Notion or some similar presentation software describing your role in a past project that you had end-to-end ownership over.

Your presentation should focus not just on outcomes or technical decisions, but also on how it connected with other teams and aligned with the organization's goals. This interview can be viewed as closer to a behavioral or cultural interview than a technical one.

Although you will need to speak to the technical aspects of the project and demonstrate domain knowledge, it’s more important that you be able to describe and assess the various decisions that you and your team made in the course of completing the project.

If there was a particularly difficult decision, explain the tradeoffs and other elements that made it difficult, how you came to a solution, and how you advocated for your approach to other team members.

Common mistakes

Technical skills mistakes:

Preparing only with generic coding and system design problems, rather than team- and role-specific ones
Failing to communicate during the interview process
Not discussing tradeoffs and limitations of a given approach
Assuming the interviews are looking for a specific answer rather than assessing your approach
Failing to understand and account for the needs of scale, the importance of infrastructural efficiency
Being unprepared for follow-ups and changing question parameters
Failing to consider safety and data security

Culture and experience mistakes:

Showing a poor understanding of Anthropic’s values
Being unwilling or unable to think through the implications of AI tools and decision-making, good or bad
Not thinking about the downstream risks of working with sensitive data
Unable to communicate about and justify decisions, understand tradeoffs, and admit when a different approach might have been better
Being unwilling or uncomfortable speaking about past experiences, particularly when those experiences were challenging or negative
Struggling with feedback or criticism, approaching work with an ego
Unfamiliarity with the ways that AI relates to ethics and its potential impact on society

Interview prep

Understand the team and the role, not just the questions. The technical assessments and questions you will face will be very domain-specific, and you should familiarize yourself with the sorts of problems the team is working on, rather than more general topics.

The questions may even relate to something the team is currently working on, and as such, they will want to see how your thinking could help them develop a more efficient solution.

Don’t neglect the culture and values. Anthropic is very clear about the importance of ethics and values to its organization — it isn’t just boilerplate ideas, but something they see as a key differentiator from other organizations in the AI space.

The recruiter will send you documents to study, but you should go beyond that and think about the potential implications of the projects you are working on.

Being able to speak clearly about the potential negative impacts of AI and how a slower, more careful process might help mitigate these risks is crucial.

Prepare for discomfort. Anthropic’s interviewers draw from a question bank in many cases, and many of the questions will prompt you to speak about past failures, mistakes, or examples of organizations, projects, and teams that you might have struggled with.

It can be very difficult to speak openly about these topics without coming across as too critical or egotistical. They want team members who are willing to approach their work without ego, who are accountable for their own mistakes, and who are willing to give and receive the necessary feedback.

About the role

What are the key characteristics of a SWE role at Anthropic?

Diverse, collaborative work: Anthropic views its engineers not just as people who build and update tools, but as contributors to the research and development of AI. Research papers, open-source contributions, and other publicly facing efforts are part of the work.
AI at scale: Anthropic’s SWEs work on tools that could impact millions of users.
Ethics and transparency: Anthropic’s approach is more deliberate and thoughtful than that of other companies in the space, enabling them to consider the implications of their models and tools more fully.

Core responsibilities

Responsibilities will vary depending on the role and team, as will the KPIs and goals you are required to meet. Generally, Anthropic SWEs will be expected to:

Develop products, systems, and tools that help users get more out of Anthropic’s LLMs
Research and implement solutions to more efficiently use computational resources.
Build guardrails and safeguards to reduce or eliminate the risks inherent to LLM training, inference, and deployment.
Working cross-functionally to coordinate on product updates and releases.

Compensation

Anthropic pays exceptionally well. Not many companies in the world pay their engineers better comp packages.

Average total compensation by level (packages can skew much higher):

Senior Software Engineer: $550,000/yr

Lead software engineer: $671,000/yr

Job requirements

Experience

Anthropic’s SWE job listings generally require at least 5 years of software development experience, ideally with a track record in the discipline of the specific role (infrastructure, security, operations, and so on).

Their careers page says they do not expect every hire to have direct AI, LLM, or ML experience, and that many current team members did not start with hands-on experience with these systems.

Education

They list a bachelor’s degree in CS, software engineering, or another technical field as desirable for new hires.

Their careers page says that about half of their staff members have advanced degrees, but it also states that for many roles, a degree or formal education isn’t required.

Resources

FAQs

How long does the Anthropic SWE interview process take?

Interviewing for a software engineering role at Anthropic usually takes at least a month from application to offer, and sometimes up to 4 months.

How many rounds are in the Anthropic SWE interview?

Depending on the level of the role, you will be expected to complete 6-8 interviews, starting with screening rounds and then moving into two on-site loops.

Where can I learn about Anthropic’s culture and values?

They have resources on their site and careers page, but the recruiters will also provide you with more in-depth reading that you will be expected to study before your on-site interviews.

Does Anthropic have internships?

They do not currently offer internships.

How long should I wait after a rejection before reapplying to Anthropic?

Their careers page says rejected applicants should wait 12 months to reapply. If something about their skills or situation materially changes, earlier reapplications may be considered.

Does Anthropic offer remote work opportunities?

Anthropic only supports hybrid roles and requires all full-time staff to come into its Bay Area office at least once a month. They will offer temporary remote work for those who want to relocate to the Bay Area, and they also provide relocation support.

Do I need to have AI experience to work at Anthropic?

No. Many roles at Anthropic do not require a background working with LLMs, AI, or ML tools.