Anthropic Interview Questions (11+ Questions)

Last Updated: June 8, 2026 • 11 QuestionsReal Company Interviews

Prepare for your Anthropic interview with our comprehensive collection of 11+ real interview questions and detailed answers. These questions have been curated from actual Anthropic technical interviews across various roles including DevOps Engineer, Data Engineer, QA Engineer, and more.

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Interview Questions
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Table of Contents

Our Anthropic interview questions cover a wide range of technical topics and difficulty levels, from entry-level positions to senior roles. Each question includes detailed explanations and answers to help you understand the concepts and prepare effectively for your interview.

💡 Pro Tips for Anthropic Interviews

  • Practice each question and understand the underlying concepts
  • Review Anthropic's specific technologies and methodologies
  • Prepare follow-up questions and edge cases
  • Practice explaining your solutions clearly and concisely

Interview Questions & Answers

1. StatefulSet Peer Resolution Failure

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: medium 🔒 Premium Categories: Devops

Configure headless services to enable pod-to-pod DNS resolution in StatefulSets. Fix service selectors and StatefulSet serviceName, enable stable DNS names like db-0.db-headless.data.svc.cluster.local, and establish peer discovery. Essential for distributed databases, cluster coordination, stateful applications, and enabling pods to communicate via stable hostnames in clustering scenarios.

2. Kubernetes Mutating Webhook Sidecar Injection Fix

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: medium 🔒 Premium Categories: Devops

Troubleshoot pod startup failures caused by mutation webhook sidecar injection. Fix namespaceSelector to exclude ml namespace, prevent unwanted sidecar container injection, and eliminate missing ConfigMap errors. Essential for webhook configuration, admission controllers, sidecar management, and namespace-based resource control.

3. Multi-Job Workflow with Artifact Handoff

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: medium Categories: Devops

Build GitHub Actions multi-job workflows: pass artifacts between jobs, implement job dependencies, and create efficient two-stage CI/CD pipelines.

4. Count Log Level Occurrences in Application Log File

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: easy Categories: Devops, Data engineering, Quality assurance

Parse an application log file to count occurrences of different log levels (DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR) using case-insensitive matching and save results as JSON in Python.

5. Valid Anagram

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: easy Categories: Devops, Data engineering, Quality assurance

def is_anagram(s: str, t: str) -> bool:
if len(s) != len(t):
return False

countS, countT = {}, {}

for i in range(len(s)):
    countS[s[i]] = countS.get(s[i], 0) + 1
    countT[t[i]] = countT.get(t[i], 0) + 1
    
return countS == countT

6. Union of Service-Specific Customer Lists

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: easy 🔒 Premium Categories: Data analysis, Data engineering

Comprehensive Guide to Consolidating Unique Customers from Multiple Service Databases

In a job interview setting, you might encounter a scenario where you need to combine customer data from distinct service databases to create a unified list. Here's a detailed and SEO-friendly explanation to ta...


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7. Subquery for Best Order per Customer

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: medium Categories: Data analysis, Data engineering

Interview Question Explanation

Objective

Given two tables, Clients and Purchases, the task is to write an SQL query that retrieves each client's name along with the ID and total amount of their highest-value purchase. The results should be sorted alphabetically by the client's name.

Additional Information

  • Each client may have multiple purchases.
  • If a client has multiple purchases with the same highest total amount, return the purchase with the smallest purchase_id.
  • The Clients table has the following columns:
    • client_id (integer): The unique identifier for each client.
    • client_name (string): The name of the client.
  • The Purchases table has the following columns:
    • purchase_id (integer): The unique identifier for each purchase.
    • client_id (integer): The identifier linking the purchase to a client.
    • amount (decimal): The total amount of the purchase.
  • Ensure that all clients with at least one purchase are included in the result.
  • Order the final output by client_name in ascending order.

This scenario is common in SQL querying tasks, especially when insights into client transactions are necessary. It's crucial to efficiently join two tables, apply grouping and aggregation functions, and sort the results correctly to achieve the desired output.

Understanding how to solve this problem can demonstrate proficiency in writing complex SQL queries that involve joins, subqueries, and sorting, which are valuable skills in data analysis and database management roles.

8. Merge Employee and Department Records

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: hard Categories: Data analysis, Data engineering

Objective

Write a SQL query to find employees whose salaries are above the average salary of their respective departments. The departments should have more than 10 employees. For each qualifying employee, return their name, department name, salary, average salary of the department, and the count of employees in the department who earn more than $75,000. The results should be ordered by department name and salary in descending order.

Additional information

  • Ensure that the departments have more than 10 employees.
  • The average salary should be rounded to 2 decimal places.
  • The query should also count how many employees in each department earn more than $75,000.
  • The results should include columns: employee_name, department_name, salary, dept_avg_salary, and high_earners.
Solution:

To address the requirement, you'll need to follow a multi-step process. Below is a SQL query that accomplishes the task:

SELECT e.name AS employee_name,
       d.name AS department_name,
       e.salary,
       ROUND(dept_stats.avg_salary, 2) AS dept_avg_salary,
       dept_stats.high_earners
FROM employees e
JOIN (
    SELECT department_id,
           AVG(salary) AS avg_salary,
           COUNT(*) AS dept_employee_count,
           SUM(CASE WHEN salary > 75000 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS high_earners
    FROM employees
    GROUP BY department_id
    HAVING COUNT(*) > 10
) AS dept_stats ON e.department_id = dept_stats.department_id
JOIN departments d ON e.department_id = d.id
WHERE e.salary > dept_stats.avg_salary
ORDER BY d.name, e.salary DESC;

This SQL query is designed to tackle the detailed objective efficiently:

  • It ensures that departments have more than 10 employees.
  • It calculates the average salary of each qualifying department.
  • It retrieves employees earning more than their department's average salary.
  • It includes the count of employees earning more than $75,000 in each department.
  • It produces the result ordered by department name and salary in descending order.

By following this approach, the query efficiently handles large datasets and ensures the results are precise and aligned with the requirements.

9. Rank Equipment Maintenance

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: hard Categories: Data analysis, Data engineering

WITH aggregated AS (
SELECT
e.equipment_id,
e.equipment_name,
e.purchase_date,
MAX(m.maintenance_date) AS latest_maintenance_date,
SUM(m.maintenance_cost) AS total_cost
FROM {{ ref("equipment") }} AS e
INNER JOIN {{ ref("maintenance_logs") }} AS m
ON e.equipment_id = m.equipment_id
GROUP BY e.equipment_id, e.equipment_name, e.purchase_date
)

SELECT
equipment_id,
equipment_name,
purchase_date,
latest_maintenance_date,
CAST(DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY total_cost DESC) AS INTEGER) AS maintenance_cost_rank
FROM aggregated
QUALIFY DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY total_cost DESC) <= 3

10. Rank Products by Sales

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: medium 🔒 Premium Categories: Data analysis, Data engineering

Certainly! Here's an SEO-friendly explanation for answering the interview question:


SQL Query to Rank Products Based on Total Sales

Objective

You are provided with a table named Products containing the columns product_id, product_name, and total_sales. Develop a SQL query tha...


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11. Search in Rotated Sorted Array

Company: Anthropic Difficulty: medium Categories: Data engineering

def search(nums: list[int], target: int) -> int:
l, r = 0, len(nums) - 1

while l <= r:
    m = (l + r) // 2
    if nums[m] == target:
        return m
        
    if nums[l] <= nums[m]:
        if nums[l] <= target < nums[m]:
            r = m - 1
        else:
            l = m + 1
    else:
        if nums[m] < target <= nums[r]:
            l = m + 1
        else:
            r = m - 1
            
return -1

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