CrackingWalnuts
Checked 3 August 2026. Anthropic describes the tools used and the interview style but publishes no round count, duration or timeline. Everything structural here is commonly reported by candidates. Source: anthropic.com/careers.
| Round | Duration | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| Phone Screen | 60 min | Strategy conversation. |
| Take-Home Exercise | 6 to 8 hours | Build a project with safety and scale framing. |
| Take-Home Discussion | 60 min | Walk through decisions at staff scale. |
| System Design Strategy | 90 min | AI strategy with safety implications. |
| AI Infra Architecture | 60 min | Critique and improve an AI infra architecture. |
| Cross-Team Leadership | 60 min | How you lead across research and engineering. |
| Behavioral / Values (Staff Scale) | 60 min | Safety judgement at staff scale. |
| Director Round | 45 min | Vision and fit. |
IC5 is the staff level. The bar is "owns multiple systems, drives technical direction with safety in mind, mentors IC4s, and works closely with research". You are expected to make real bets and defend them, not to focus on a category and hope.
At staff scale the safety dimension stops being a checklist and becomes part of how you reason about every decision.
Anthropic expects you to think about misuse, prompt injection, hallucination failure modes, and auditability as design requirements across systems, not as an afterthought.
Targeted guidance per round in this loop. Each section links to the matching track on the site. There is no shortcut list, the bar moves loop to loop, so build the pattern recognition and the stories from real practice.
Work the pattern templates until the recognition is instant. Trace one mock problem per pattern. Practice stating time and space complexity out loud before you write code.
At Anthropic IC5 (Staff Engineer), the design portion of the loop is all AI engineering, not classical system design. The round is: AI Infra Architecture (60 min): Critique and improve an AI infra architecture.. Bar is owning architectural direction across teams. Trade-offs need numbers, alternatives need names, and the deep dive should be in your strongest area. Prepare in the AI Engineering track, not the System Design Problems track.
Staff bar. The work shifts to cross-team initiative, strategic judgment, influence without authority, and growing other engineers. Behavioral weight is roughly equal to system design at this level. Frame stories around safety-mindedness, mission alignment, and judgment under uncertainty about capabilities.