Interview guides
Company-by-company breakdowns of what the frontier AI labs actually ask — every round, the exact questions, the follow-ups the interviewer escalates with, and what a passing answer looks like. Reconstructed from 560+ verified candidate reports across 6 companies and 193 catalogued questions.
Anthropic's loop is recruiter screen → CodeSignal-style 90-minute Python coding assessment → 1–2 phone screens → a 5-round virtual onsite..
OpenAI's loop is typically a recruiter chat → 1–2 phone screens (60–75 min each, coding or ML coding) → a 4–5 round virtual onsite with a hiring manager round at the start or end..
Waymo's loop is recruiter contact → a real technical phone screen (60 min live coding — BFS/graph problems and pure-Python data processing are the recurring themes, often with 'no pandas' as an explicit constraint) → a 3–5 round virtual onsite mixing coding, system design, a technical deep dive, and a hiring-manager behavioral..
xAI's loop opens with a 15-minute engineer phone screen that follows a consistent script — self-introduction, most-challenging-project deep dive, and 'why xAI / what would you do here' — though reports also describe surprise coding prompts replacing the chat entirely..
Perplexity's loop opens with a recruiter chat and moves quickly into a coding round (a live '店面' phone screen or an OA), then an onsite..
Mercor's loop opens with a ~30-minute technical phone screen — often verbal (algorithm, mental math, code correctness, a bit of system design) rather than a classic LeetCode round, sometimes just reading and explaining code plus a little OO design..