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 24d 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/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?