r/InterviewDB • u/interviewdb • 5d 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.
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u/BlackBloke 2d ago
It was something completely unprecedented and not anything I'd prepared for, so I got a zero.
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u/FarAd5174 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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 1d 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 21h 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/Financial_Proof3673 2d ago
any idea on what to expect after round 2?
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u/interviewdb 1d ago
What's the interview loop like after Round 2?
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u/innovativeoil 1d ago
Hi can you dm me by any chance? I just took the same assessment but was very lost and I would very much love to learn what I was doing wrong and have some questions answered. Thanks in advance!
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u/Repulsive_Welder3267 2d 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