Anthropic's interview process is challenging, fast-moving, and opaque in parts. But without knowing what's ahead, it's even harder to prepare as a candidate.

This guide walks you through exactly what to expect at each stage of Anthropic’s interview process and how to prepare for it. We've researched dozens of real candidate reports and other trusted sources to understand what the company actually looks for, and we've distilled that into actionable strategies for each round.

Here's an overview of Anthropic's full interview process:

Before we dive into each step, let's get to know Anthropic.

Click here to practice 1-on-1 with Anthropic interview coaches

1. About Anthropic ↑

Anthropic is one of the most talked-about companies in artificial intelligence today, and for good reason. Anthropic was built around a single big idea: that AI should be powerful, but also safe, interpretable, and under meaningful human control. 

The company’s founding team left OpenAI after growing concerns about how quickly AI systems were scaling and how little was understood about their inner workings. That ethos still defines Anthropic’s culture and mission.

The company operates with a mission-first culture and a team spanning physics, machine learning, public policy, and business backgrounds. Anthropic is transparent about its hiring philosophy, too: it values diverse backgrounds over traditional credentials (as you’ll see in the next section).

2. Working at Anthropic ↑

AI safety is central to how Anthropic operates. It shapes how the company sets priorities, makes decisions, and approaches the development of its models.

You'll also see this in interviews, where you may be asked how you make decisions under uncertainty, weigh potential risks, or think about the longer-term impact of your work. You don't need to be an AI safety expert, but you should be able to explain why Anthropic's mission matters to you.

2.2 High-trust, low-ego organization

Anthropic describes its workplace culture as "high-trust" and "low-ego." Communication is direct and honest, and ideas are judged on their merits rather than the seniority or status of the person proposing them.

Employees are also given significant autonomy to make decisions and take ownership of problems. As the company often reminds its team, if something urgently needs to be done, you’re expected to step up rather than wait for permission or assume someone else will handle it.

2.3 Diverse technical paths

Anthropic is open to candidates from a range of technical backgrounds. You don’t need prior ML experience to apply. In fact, roughly half of its technical staff came from non-ML backgrounds.

You should, however, provide "direct evidence of ability" that shows you can learn and contribute. This could include GitHub projects, technical blog posts, open-source contributions, or other work that demonstrates your technical skills.

2.4 Selective hiring culture

Anthropic is becoming more selective in its hiring, particularly for junior technical roles. According to its 2026 employment report, the share of junior technical hires fell from 27% to 9% as teams increasingly offloaded work like coding and debugging to Claude.

As AI takes on more of the entry-level work traditionally handled by junior employees, Anthropic has less need to hire for those tasks. Instead, it is placing greater emphasis on candidates who can work autonomously, exercise strong judgment, and use AI effectively on more complex work.

3. Anthropic's seven core values ↑

Anthropic’s values guide how the team builds and deploys AI systems, with a strong emphasis on safety and minimizing harm. They reflect the company’s approach to balancing the potential benefits of advanced AI with its risks, making responsible decisions, and considering the long-term impact of its work.

Throughout your interviews, you’ll be evaluated on how these principles show up in your own reasoning and decision-making. You don’t have to agree with every approach Anthropic takes, but you should show that you understand and take its core values seriously.

Anthropic's 7 core values

Anthropic’s 7 Core Values

1. Act for the global good

“We strive to make decisions that maximize positive outcomes for humanity in the long run. This means we’re willing to be very bold in the actions we take to ensure our technology is a robustly positive force for good. We take seriously the task of safely guiding the world through a technological revolution that has the potential to change the course of human history, and are committed to helping make this transition go well.”

2. Hold light and shade

“AI has the potential to pose unprecedented risks to humanity if things go badly. It also has the potential to create unprecedented benefits for humanity if things go well. We need shade to understand and protect against the potential for bad outcomes. We need light to realize the good outcomes.”

3. Be good to our users

“At Anthropic, we define ‘users' broadly. Users are our customers, policy-makers, Ants, and anyone impacted by the technology we build or the actions we take. We cultivate generosity and kindness in all our interactions—with each other, with our users, and with the world at large. Going above and beyond for each other, our customers, and all of the people affected by our technology is meeting expectations.”

4. Ignite a race to the top on safety

“As a safety-first company, we believe that building reliable, trustworthy, and secure systems is our collective responsibility - and the market agrees. We work to inspire a ‘race to the top’ dynamic where AI developers must compete to develop the most safe and secure AI systems. We want to constantly set the industry bar for AI safety and security and drive others to do the same.”

5. Do the simple thing that works

“We take an empirical approach to problems and care about the size of our impact and not the sophistication of our methods. This doesn’t mean we throw together haphazard solutions. It means we try to identify the simplest solution and iterate from there. We don’t invent a spaceship if all we need is a bicycle.”

6. Be helpful, honest, and harmless

“Anthropic is a high-trust, low-ego organization. We communicate kindly and directly, assuming good intentions even in disagreement. We are thoughtful about our actions, avoiding harm and repairing relationships when needed. Everyone contributes, regardless of role. If something urgently needs to be done, the right person to do it is probably you!”

7. Put the mission first

“At the end of the day, the mission is what we’re all here for. It gives us a shared purpose and allows us to act swiftly together, rather than being pulled in multiple directions by competing goals. It engenders trust and collaboration and is the final arbiter in our decisions. When it comes to our mission, none of us are bystanders. We each take personal ownership over making our mission successful."

4. Anthropic interview process and timeline ↑

Anthropic interview process and timeline

The Anthropic interview process typically takes 4 weeks to 3+ months, depending on factors like team matching and reference check timing. The steps can vary by role, but most candidates go through these main stages:

  1. Resume screen
  2. Recruiter call (30 minutes)
  3. CodeSignal online assessment (90 minutes)
  4. Hiring manager screen (1 hour)
  5. Technical interview loops (4-5 rounds, 55 minutes each)
  6. Reference checks & team matching (variable, 2-4+ weeks)
  7. Offer & negotiation

Your recruiter may clarify your specific process during the initial call.

Step 1: Resume screen 

The first step of the Anthropic interview process is the resume screen.

Anthropic's recruiting team reviews your application against the requirements of the open role. If you pass, you'll receive a CodeSignal link from a recruiter within a few days.

This is an extremely competitive step. To help you put together a targeted resume that stands out from the crowd, check out our resume guides. Use the guides as your starting point to make a competitive resume for free.

If you’re looking for expert feedback, you can also get help on your resume from one of our tech recruiters, who will cover what achievements to focus on (or ignore), how to fine-tune your bullet points, and more.

Step 2: Recruiter screen ↑

Your first interaction after your application is accepted will be with a recruiter from Anthropic's talent team. If you applied directly through Anthropic's careers portal, applied through an employee referral, or were contacted directly by a recruiter, this call is your next step.

The recruiter's job is to confirm that your background is relevant to the role and that you're genuinely interested in Anthropic before the company invests significant time in technical assessments. It's usually just a conversation designed to assess cultural fit and clarify expectations on both sides.

You can expect the following question during the call:

Anthropic recruiter screen example interview questions

  • Why Anthropic specifically?
  • Why this role?
  • Walk me through your resume
  • What are your career goals? Where do you want to go in 3-5 years?
  • What does AI safety mean to you?
  • What could happen if advanced AI is misused?
  • Have you ever faced a situation that conflicted with your values?
  • Have you followed Anthropic’s recent decisions, and is there anything you disagreed with?
  • What does being a technical leader mean in your current work?
  • What do you understand about the team and its responsibilities?

You should also use this opportunity to ask questions about Anthropic’s hiring process, including how many rounds you'll face, what each one focuses on, and timeline expectations.

Step 3: CodeSignal Online assessment ↑

If you pass the recruiter screen, you’ll receive a link to complete a timed coding assessment on CodeSignal. This is common for technical roles such as software engineer, research engineer, and research scientist.

You’ll typically get one complex problem that becomes progressively harder across four levels. You’ll have 90 minutes to complete as much of it as you can.

Based on recent candidate reports, these problems tend to test:

  • Your ability to write clean, modular code that can handle added complexity
  • How you adapt your solution as new requirements are introduced
  • Whether you consider performance and edge cases
  • Your overall problem-solving process

Below are some examples of problems you might encounter during Anthropic’s CodeSignal assessment.

Anthropic CodeSignal online assessment example interview questions

  • Build an in-memory key-value database, starting with basic SET, GET, and DELETE operations, then adding filtered scans, TTL timestamps, and file compression
  • Build a banking system, starting with account creation and deposits, then adding transaction-volume rankings and money transfers
  • Implement a constrained file cache
  • Build a simplified cloud database
  • Build an image-processing pipeline that transforms images based on JSON data using Pillow
  • Build a web scraper for a given domain, first serially and then with concurrency or parallelization

Note that a high score does not guarantee that you’ll advance to the next rounds. Some candidates on Glassdoor report getting near-perfect scores and still being rejected, suggesting that Anthropic considers your CodeSignal score alongside your performance in later interviews.

If you do pass, you’ll receive an email within one to two weeks inviting you to the next stage: the Anthropic hiring manager interview. If not, you’ll get an automated rejection and can reapply after 12 months, or sooner if your skills or experience have significantly evolved.

Step 4: Hiring manager screen / project deep dive ↑

Anthropic’s hiring manager interview is a technical deep dive into a specific project you worked on and your work style.

Come prepared with two or three projects you know well. For each, be ready to explain the technical decisions you made, why you made them, how the project performed, and what you would do differently now.

For engineering roles, expect fewer questions around coding and more around architectural reasoning. The interviewer may ask how you would scale your system, what would fail first under load, how you would redesign it under different constraints, or how you would instrument it for observability. The goal is to understand how you reason through technical problems and trade-offs, rather than whether you arrive at a specific answer.

If you pass this stage, you’ll move on to the technical interview loop, typically scheduled within one to two weeks.

Step 5: Technical interview loops ↑

The loop typically consists of four or five rounds: 

In some cases, Anthropic adds a fifth round, which is typically either a project deep dive (where you walk through a past technical project in detail) or a separate hiring manager conversation. 

Let's dive into each.

1. Live coding interview

The first technical round focuses on practical problem-solving. 

You'll receive a real-world problem and be expected to write code from scratch in a shared environment (Google Colab or Replit), run and debug it, discuss your approach and tradeoffs, and think out loud about edge cases and potential improvements.

Unlike typical algorithmic challenges, these problems are grounded in real engineering work. 

Anthropic interviewers are looking for engineers who can start simple, iterate thoughtfully, and debug methodically. They care less about cleverness and more about clarity.

A good way to prepare for this round is to practice on shared environments like Google Colab or Replit, not in your local IDE. 

Example live coding interview questions asked at Anthropic

  • Build a web crawler / concurrent web crawler
  • Given a domain name and main URL, parse all URLs on the site and return a count of those matching the given domain
  • Build a banking application: implement deposits, withdrawals, transfers, and ranking accounts by transaction volume
  • Implement a message ingestion component that handles streaming data with unpredictable latency spikes
  • Implement a concurrent system component and make it fault-tolerant under specific failure modes
  • Write a concurrent and multithreaded solution with a focus on async programming and file systems
  • Implement an in-memory database in Python
  • Build an OOP system where each stage builds on the last, requiring careful refactoring and design decisions

Learn more about how to get better at coding interviews here.

2. System design interview

The second technical round focuses on designing large-scale distributed systems. They're LLM-specific and very technical. 

Here, you’ll be assessed on how well you understand distributed systems, reason through scaling challenges, identify bottlenecks, handle LLM-specific issues, choose appropriate technologies, and explain your trade-offs.

Example system design interview questions asked at Anthropic

Traditional system design

  • Design a file cache system
  • Design a file store system (set, get, filter, backup, restore, and related operations)
  • Design a web crawler

AI/LLM system design

  • Design Anthropic's Claude chat service
  • Design a practical LLM-related system (specific prompt varies by team and candidate background)
  • Design a high-concurrency inference API and parallel processing pipeline
  • Design a model evaluation and monitoring system
  • Design a prompt caching and retrieval system

For more practice questions, see our guides to Anthropic system design interviews, ML system design interviews, and GenAI system design interviews.

3. LLM & prompt engineering interview

The third technical round focuses on working practically with LLMs. You'll work on a problem involving LLMs, typically in Google Colab. 

Interviewers want to see that you understand how LLMs work, their limitations, and how to design systems that account for those constraints.

Example LLM & prompt engineering interview questions asked at Anthropic

  • Design effective prompts for specific use cases and think through the systematic approach to prompt engineering
  • Build systems that call LLM APIs efficiently (managing tokens, handling rate limits, thinking about cost models)
  • Design multi-step reasoning systems where multiple LLM calls work together.

Check out our AI engineer interview questions guide for more AI/ML-related questions.

4. Culture fit/research brainstorming interview 

The final round shifts focus from what you know to how you think.

This round assesses whether your values align with Anthropic's mission and approach, you can think about long-term impact, you consider downside risks and potential harms, you're intellectually curious and thoughtful, and you'd be a good cultural fit with the team.

Example culture fit/research brainstorming questions asked at Anthropic

  • Walk through a past project you’re proud of and discuss your decisions
  • Reflect on tradeoffs between long-term and short-term choices.
  • Brainstorm solutions in an open-ended AI problem space.
  • Share your motivations and how you think about risk, ethics, or impact.
  • Describe a time when you had to make a difficult ethical decision at work.
  • Talk about a time when you disagreed with your team and how you handled it.

Learn more in our comprehensive guide to Anthropic's culture interviews. 

For more practice questions by role, check out our guide to 30+ common Anthropic interview questions and how to answer them.

If you're targeting a specific role at Anthropic, check out the following role-specific guides to learn more about the types of questions you might face:

Step 6: Reference checks & team matching ↑

After you pass the technical interviews, Anthropic typically moves into reference checks and team matching.

You’ll be asked to provide references who can speak to your work, technical ability, and how you collaborate with others. At the same time, Anthropic will look for an open team that matches your skills and experience.

If there’s a clear fit, you’ll move toward an offer. If not, this stage can take longer, even after you’ve passed the technical rounds. Some candidates report waiting two to four weeks for an update.

Note: Some candidates report waiting 10–14 days for an update. That said, you can (and should) stay proactive. If you haven’t heard back within 7–10 days of submitting your references, don’t hesitate to follow up with your recruiter.

Step 6: Offer & negotiation ↑

If you pass team matching and a team wants you, your recruiter will contact you to discuss the offer. They'll walk through compensation (salary, equity, bonus if applicable), discuss your start date and logistics, and discuss visa sponsorship if needed.

Anthropic's packages are comparable to similar roles at companies such as Meta. Packages typically include base salary and equity, plus benefits like comprehensive health coverage (for you and dependents), 22 weeks of paid parental leave, flexible PTO, and a $500/month wellness and time-saver stipend.

While your offer may look top band, you don't have to accept the first one. Negotiation is expected, so come prepared with data from Levels.fyi and have a clear number in mind before the conversation starts.

Below are some tips to help you navigate your salary negotiations. 

Salary negotiation tips

  • Be polite: Remember that the person you’re negotiating with is just doing their job, and that the two of you are not enemies. You’ll get much further in your negotiations if you approach the conversation with grace.
  • Don’t give a number right away: Whenever possible, it’s better to wait until you receive an offer to start negotiating. This reduces the risk of giving a number that is lower than what the company otherwise would have paid, or giving a number that is so high that they'll be reluctant to interview you.
  • Do your research: Have a number in mind before the conversation begins, and back it up with data. Research your position and level on Levels.fyi, ask around on professional social networking sites like Blind, factor in the cost of living where you are, and, ideally, get some input from a current Anthropic employee.
  • Start high: To start the conversation, name a compensation number that is higher than your goal, and the Anthropic negotiator will likely end up negotiating it down to a number that is closer to your original goal.
  • Negotiate everything: Your offer will include more than a base salary and stock options. You also have bonuses, vacation days, location, work from home, and other aspects to consider. If the salary won’t budge, there may be some wiggle room around the other perks.

For even more salary negotiation tips, check out our product manager job offer negotiation guide. It’s written for PMs, but the principles apply across roles.

Once you’re ready to put your negotiation skills to the test, get salary negotiation coaching from ex-FAANG recruiters so you can practice with and get instant feedback from a real expert.

Interviewing at other FAANG+, emerging tech, or AI labs? Check out our FAANG interview process and FAANG interview prep guides for company-specific insights into the companies and different roles you’re targeting.

 

Frequently asked questions about the Anthropic interview process ↑

How long does Anthropic take to respond to job applications?

It varies. Some candidates report hearing back and receiving a recruiter screen invitation within 1–2 weeks, while others say they were ghosted or waited months to receive a rejection email. Some applicants also report being rejected within a few hours of submitting their application.

If you have the opportunity to get an internal referral, it may help your application get reviewed sooner.

What if I don't have ML experience?

Anthropic welcomes people without ML backgrounds. About half their technical staff don't have prior ML experience. If you're applying:

  • Highlight your engineering fundamentals
  • Demonstrate ability to learn
  • Show curiosity about the domain

Your non-ML background might actually be an advantage as you bring a fresh perspective.

What if I get rejected?

You can reapply after 12 months. Alternatively, if something materially changes about your experience or skills (you built something significant, published research, etc.), you can reapply earlier with a stronger application.

Anthropic does not provide feedback on rejections, whether during CodeSignal, interviews, or team matching. This is a limitation of their process, not a reflection on you.

Should I use AI tools to prepare?

Anthropic's careers page includes a policy on AI usage in the application process. The summary: You can use AI for brainstorming, refining your thinking, and general preparation. Don't use it to generate code solutions for CodeSignal or during interviews.

Will they sponsor my visa?

Yes, Anthropic sponsors visas. While they can’t do so for every role or candidate (operations roles, for example, are especially difficult to support), they make every effort to help technical hires relocate. If you receive an offer, Anthropic will retain an immigration lawyer to assist with the process and guide you through every step of getting to the US.

5. Are you prepared for your Anthropic interviews? ↑

We've coached more than 15,000 people for interviews since 2018. In our experience, practicing real interviews with experts who can give you company-specific feedback makes a huge difference.

Find an Anthropic interview coach so you can:

  • Test yourself under real interview conditions
  • Get accurate feedback from a real expert
  • Build your confidence
  • Get company-specific insights
  • Learn how to tell the right stories, better
  • Save time by focusing your preparation

Landing a job at a leading AI company like Anthropic often results in significant career growth and the opportunity to work on transformative problems. Three or four coaching sessions worth ~$500 make a great difference in your ability to land the job.

Click here to book mock interviews with Anthropic interview coaches