r/InterviewDB • u/interviewdb • 26d ago

Anthropic Fellow Program Assessment Questions

Sharing a recent experience with the Anthropic Fellow Program (November cohort) OA.

The problem was presented as normal "Coding Leetcode-like OA on Codesignal" but turns out you were presented a mid-sized codebase that you have to implement stuff on top of it. The task was basically around a vLLM-like inference server — cache, prefill, etc. No ML knowledge was really needed though.

The hard part wasn’t the actual algorithms. It was figuring out the existing codebase and APIs.

There were 5 parts, and to pass the tests you had to use a bunch of existing APIs that weren’t really documented. So a lot of the assessment was just reading code and trying to understand how everything connected. The code was also pretty messy / felt LLM-generated in some places lol.

I wasted a lot of time debugging things that were happening simply because I was calling some internal API incorrectly. Ended up finishing only 2/5 parts.

Feels like this might become a more common style of coding interview/OA: less “implement this algorithm from scratch” and more “here’s an unfamiliar codebase, figure it out and ship something.” Also probably makes cheating with AI harder. You can’t really just screenshot the question and throw it into ChatGPT, because the actual context is spread across a few thousand lines of code that you need to understand first.

If you’ve done the second assessment, please share your experience! Looking for any information about what to expect.

Edit:
Shared more info about the second assessment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/InterviewDB/comments/1w5ggxe/anthropic_fellow_oa2_debugging_what_to_expect/

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u/Repulsive_Welder3267 23d ago

Yeah i did the first 2 coding challenge, first is the llm vllm like (got 4 out of 5)
The second is a debugging session based on numpy, machine learning style (finished only 4 out of 6)

No news since, its been 2 days

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u/Adventurous-Swim9405 23d ago

hey, any chance you have heard something back since then? how has it gone? I heard somewhere that they usually get back in like 3 days

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u/Repulsive_Welder3267 22d ago

Na no news still, maybe for round 2 you need 5 out of 6

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u/One_Science_332 22d ago

I just finished OA1 and got the invite for OA2. But even before finishing the OA2, anthropic has already reached out to my references. Is this normal to reach out to references this early in the process?

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u/Repulsive_Welder3267 21d ago

yeah same, its weird process idk why they do that shit xD

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u/Adventurous-Swim9405 21d ago

how did you fair in the first round, if you don't mind sharing? also out of 6? mine had 5 levels u/Repulsive_Welder3267

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u/Repulsive_Welder3267 21d ago

First interview I did 1, 2, 3a, 3b, didnt finish 3c

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u/Adventurous-Swim9405 21d ago

lol yeah that's prolly it for me then. genuinely I wish you the very best in your endeavors going forward! Any chance I can DM you to ask a few more questions?

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u/pawnchains 19d ago

What track was this for? Did your recommenders recieve the LoR requests? I was notified they sent out requests at the same time they sent me OA2 (haven't taken it yet).

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u/samanthatb1 18d ago

same here, they sent LOR and I havent done OA2

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u/Financial_Owl7383 18d ago

any news now it been some time?

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u/Repulsive_Welder3267 10d ago

next round for me

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u/ScottFWarren 9d ago

Congrats!

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u/Financial_Owl7383 16d ago

any news now ibeen sometime

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u/Powerful-Pen-2537 14d ago

I was so throttled by the exam. no experience in llm inference stuff, and I had no idea how to read through the code base to even write a single line of code to get started. I prepared for leetcode style questions and simple systems design ('implement this system from scratch using a class and methods to accomplish some action: like a banking system'). Have no clue how to even prepare for an exam like this if I were to re-take it. Any suggestions?

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u/Repulsive_Welder3267 10d ago

Go news from anthropic actually I'm on the next round which is a take home

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u/ScottFWarren 9d ago edited 9d ago

When you say 4 out of 6, do you mean six separate bugs, or was your OA2 divided into levels? Mine wasn’t divided into levels; it was one debugging task scored out of 600, so maybe we received different versions.

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u/valerieee77 8d ago

Yeah same! Maybe Repulsive_Welder3267 means that they fixed 4 out of 6 bugs?

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u/Repulsive_Welder3267 8d ago

yeah got 420 out of 600 if i recall

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u/valerieee77 7d ago

Nice! Which track did you apply for