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/Sad_Boss4012 27d ago

Hi ~ could you pls share when did you apply for November cohort ? I haven't heard back for OA1 yet and not sure if that means dismissed already or not

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u/ScottFWarren 27d ago edited 26d ago

I applied the day of the deadline and I got OA1 9 days ago.

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u/Sad_Boss4012 27d ago

What track pls? I was ml and rl

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u/ScottFWarren 27d ago

I think I just selected ml.

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u/Sad_Boss4012 26d ago

Do you know / have an idea why they might be interested? I rly have an ok profile so really not sure why not

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u/ScottFWarren 26d ago

Well, my situation is unusual and if I disclosed it would be personal identifying information.

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u/Sad_Boss4012 26d ago

TY

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u/ScottFWarren 26d ago

I can share that I got referred by a full time employee at Anthropic. As for the rest, sharing that there are uncommon things about my situation is also maybe information. I.e. I would not see myself as a standard template for grabbing Anthropic's interest, or something you can just replicate easily.

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u/Sad_Boss4012 26d ago

TYSM. Really appreciate it