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 610+ verified candidate reports across 13 companies and 459 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 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..
Palantir usually skips the OA and opens with a recruiter call that probes why you want Palantir specifically — reports describe the company as unusually sensitive about motivation fit..
Harvey's loop is unusually predictable, and the reports say so directly: twelve of the fifty threads in this corpus describe the question they got as 地里的老题 — the known one from the forum..
Roblox runs a conventional loop with an unusually concentrated question set..
Zip (ZipHQ) is a procurement-automation startup, and its loop is unusually front-loaded on the phone screen — reports show candidates rejected there far more often than at the onsite..
Robinhood's loop is a recruiter call, a technical phone screen, and a virtual onsite of three to four rounds — typically coding, a project deep dive, and system design..
Databricks' loop is a recruiter call, one technical phone screen, and a virtual onsite of two coding rounds, a system design round, and a behavioral or hiring-manager round; senior and staff loops swap a coding round for a tech-fit project discussion..
Stripe's loop is built from its own round types rather than LeetCode..