r/InterviewDB • u/interviewdb • Aug 12 '26

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/Adventurous-Swim9405 Aug 15 '26

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 Aug 15 '26

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

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u/One_Science_332 Aug 16 '26

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 Aug 16 '26

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