went through the EM loop at Anthropic earlier this year. sharing because the bar is different from what you'd prep for at a typical big tech company and I wasted two weeks prepping for the wrong things.
First thing to understand: this is a safety-focused AI lab. the EM interview reflects that. they care deeply about how you think about the ethics of what you're building, not just shipping velocity and team health.
What the loop looked like: recruiter screen hiring manager conversation (this is more of a culture fit chat, but they're already assessing you) technical screen: for EM roles they still wanted to see that I could read and reason about code. not a leetcode session. they walked through a simplified version of an architectural decision and asked how I'd coach an engineer through it. it's really a "can you still think technically and explain it" check. people management: standard stuff but pushed hard. conflict resolution, performance management, how you handle a strong disagreement with a senior IC who doesn't report to you. have detailed stories. cross-functional: how you partner with research, how you handle a researcher who wants to take a technical direction that creates safety risk or ops risk. mission/values: not a gotcha round. they genuinely want to understand why you want to work in AI safety specifically. vague answers don't land.
the behavioral questions were more specific than most places. "tell me about a time" but then follow-ups that dig two or three levels deeper. have the actual details of your stories ready.
one thing that's genuinely different: they asked what I thought about a specific capability/safety tradeoff in a hypothetical product. it wasn't a quiz, it was a conversation. they wanted to see how I reason, not whether I landed on the "right" answer.
level-wise: I was interviewing for a small-team EM (5-8 eng). comp was in the 280-340k range for total depending on equity valuation assumptions. the equity picture is the tricky part since it's pre-IPO.
if you're coming from FAANG, expect the process to be a bit slower and more deliberate. they're not optimizing for volume.