Anthropic Staff Engineer: Word Break II, a message ingestion pairing round, a Distributed Task Scheduler design, then a rejection after the hiring manager round

I was interviewing for a staff engineering position and the first round was a recruiter screen. Very standard questions, everything was covered in here.

The next round was a LeetCode question. For anyone who is interested it was about writing a tokenizer and a detokenizer for a language with no delimiters (Word Break II).

The next round was a coding round where I did a deep dive pair programming session with one of their engineers. It was intense and I felt they really wanted to see you write robust code that could handle edge cases and failures well. I was asked to build a reliable message ingestion component that could handle streaming data with unpredictable latency spikes.

After that I had a system design round that was very similar to Distributed Task Scheduler. Again it was pretty intense and they go very deep at certain parts.

The final round (I think there could have been more) was a hiring manager round where there again were more standard questions but then AI related questions around my thoughts on alignment. There could be more rounds, I got rejected after this one. I guess you should probably come in with an opinion on AI safety. I said I didn't really think it was an issue and I don't think that is what they wanted to hear.