Anthropic
AI safety and research company behind Claude, focusing on constitutional AI.
5 Rounds
~20 Days
Very Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you had to balance rapid iteration and deployment speed with strict security and reliability requirements. How did you handle the trade-offs?
#Security
#Agile
#Decision Making
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
You receive a PagerDuty alert at 2 AM that API latency has spiked by 400%. Walk me through your incident response and triage process.
#SRE
#Troubleshooting
#Communication
DevOps Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you strongly disagreed with a technical decision made by a senior engineer or researcher. How did you resolve it?
#Communication
#Conflict Resolution
#Collaboration
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
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easy
Describe a time you automated yourself out of a job or significantly reduced operational toil for your team.
#Automation
#Impact
#Initiative
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to learn a completely new technology under immense pressure to solve a critical production issue.
#Adaptability
#Problem Solving
#Stress Management
DevOps Engineer
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Behavioral
•
easy
Why do you want to work at Anthropic specifically? How do your engineering values align with our focus on AI safety and reliability?
#Motivation
#Company Values
#AI Safety
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Write a Python script to parse a large stream of application logs, identify rate-limited requests (HTTP 429), and output the top 5 offending API keys.
#Python
#Log Parsing
#Data Structures
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Go or Python program to interact with the AWS EC2 API, find all orphaned EBS volumes (status 'available'), and delete them if they haven't been attached in the last 30 days.
#API Integration
#AWS
#Cost Optimization
#Coding
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Given a list of overlapping IP CIDR blocks, write a function to merge them into the minimum number of non-overlapping CIDR blocks.
#Networking
#Algorithms
#Intervals
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Write a script to validate a complex JSON configuration file against a predefined JSON schema, and output human-readable error messages for any validation failures.
#JSON
#Validation
#Automation
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Implement a basic rate limiter class in Python or Go using the Token Bucket algorithm.
#Concurrency
#Algorithms
#System Design
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a bash or Python script that continuously monitors a specific process by PID and alerts if its memory usage exceeds a certain threshold for more than 5 minutes.
#Linux
#Process Management
#Monitoring
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Write a function to implement a basic Round Robin load balancer. It should take a list of servers and return the next server to route a request to.
#Load Balancing
#Data Structures
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a script to recursively traverse a directory, calculate the SHA-256 hash of all files, and output a list of duplicate files.
#File System
#Hashing
#Python/Bash
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design the infrastructure for serving a large language model like Claude, ensuring high availability, low latency, and efficient GPU utilization.
#Infrastructure
#GPU Provisioning
#High Availability
#Load Balancing
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
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hard
How would you design a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster for our AI researchers, ensuring strict network isolation and resource quotas between different research teams?
#Kubernetes
#Security
#Networking
#Multi-tenancy
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Describe how you would structure a Terraform repository for a rapidly growing infrastructure team managing multiple environments (Dev, Staging, Prod) across multiple cloud regions.
#Terraform
#Architecture
#State Management
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a CI/CD pipeline for a massive monorepo containing both ML model weights and application code. How do you optimize build and deployment times?
#CI/CD
#Monorepo
#Performance Optimization
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
How would you design an observability stack to monitor the health and performance of thousands of distributed GPU training jobs?
#Observability
#Prometheus
#Grafana
#Distributed Systems
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a highly available, secure egress proxy architecture for our internal VPCs to ensure outbound traffic is strictly filtered and logged.
#Networking
#Security
#AWS/GCP
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to securely ingest, sanitize, and store petabytes of training data from external sources.
#Data Engineering
#Security
#Storage
#Scale
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
You are tasked with migrating a critical, high-traffic service from AWS to GCP. How do you plan and execute this migration with zero downtime?
#Cloud Migration
#Networking
#Databases
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a GitOps workflow using ArgoCD or Flux for deploying microservices. How do you handle environment promotion (Dev -> Staging -> Prod)?
#GitOps
#CI/CD
#Kubernetes
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
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medium
You notice a Kubernetes pod running a critical ML inference workload is stuck in a CrashLoopBackOff state. Walk me through your exact troubleshooting steps.
#Kubernetes
#Debugging
#Containers
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Anthropic places a heavy emphasis on security. How would you securely manage and inject secrets into a CI/CD pipeline deploying to AWS/GCP without hardcoding them?
#CI/CD
#Secrets Management
#IAM
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
We need to upgrade our production Kubernetes cluster to a new minor version. Walk me through your strategy to achieve this with zero downtime for our API users.
#Kubernetes
#Upgrades
#Zero Downtime
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
easy
Explain the difference between a Kubernetes Deployment and a StatefulSet. In what scenario involving ML infrastructure would you strictly require a StatefulSet?
#Kubernetes
#State Management
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you handle Terraform state drift? Describe a mechanism you would build to automatically detect and remediate manual changes made in the AWS console.
#Terraform
#Automation
#Compliance
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
What are SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs? How would you define them for a user-facing LLM inference API?
#SRE
#Metrics
#Reliability
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
We use AWS IAM extensively. Explain how IAM Role assumption works, and how you would prevent the 'confused deputy' problem in a cross-account setup.
#AWS
#IAM
#Security
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How would you optimize Docker image build times and reduce the final image size for a Python-based ML application with heavy dependencies like PyTorch?
#Docker
#Optimization
#CI/CD
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the Linux boot process from the moment a server is powered on to when the user login prompt appears.
#OS Fundamentals
#Linux
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
What is a Kubernetes Mutating Admission Webhook? Give an example of how you would use it to enforce security policies at Anthropic.
#Kubernetes
#Security
#Extensibility
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle database schema migrations in a fully automated CI/CD pipeline without causing locks or downtime?
#CI/CD
#Databases
#Automation
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain how DNS resolution works. If an internal service in a VPC cannot resolve an external domain, what specific steps do you take to debug?
#DNS
#Troubleshooting
#Networking
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