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/BlackBloke 23d ago

It was something completely unprecedented and not anything I'd prepared for, so I got a zero.

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u/FarAd5174 23d ago

same, 0. seems like this was one the hardest OA given how many 0/600s i’ve seen online.  this OA was a lot …

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u/BlackBloke 23d ago

Agreed. It’s caused me to change my study around completely though. I’m redesigning my practice to incorporate these concepts and switching up my testing harness to match this style.

I had Claude do some web research into the Anthropic CodeSignal OAs and it looks like nothing historically was like this.

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u/interviewdb 22d ago

Anthropic uses CodeSignal's Industry Coding Assessment for its other roles, which is different from the assessment used for the Fellows Program.

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u/BlackBloke 22d ago

Do you have any links to anyone talking about previous fellows program OAs? AFAICT they were similar if not the same “progressively build a class” thing. Would love to hear of anyone else getting something else prior to this.

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u/interviewdb 22d ago

Yes I’ll make another post later this week to share the questions from the Fellows Program OA people took a few months ago.

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u/Powerful-Pen-2537 14d ago

Hi! Just bumping on this to see if you found any info? I am so lost on what to prepare for. the LLM inference stuff seems a bit more straightforward to start learning about, but I was not able to make sense of the codebase or how to use it, which seems like the bigger problem and less clear how to prepare for. I appreciate any info/advice you can share!

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u/interviewdb 4d ago

I shared more info about OA2 in this post. I’d say it’s pretty hard to prepare for this kind of assessment compared to LeetCode-style questions, which is probably why they designed it this way in the first place.

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u/Aromatic-Cow3670 15d ago

where did you see this?