Anthropic Software Engineer interview experience

The prompt framed it as stock-price question answering using tools, and starter code only covered simple cases that made a single tool call. I had to extend that into an agent loop that could handle more complex questions that needed multi-step reasoning and potentially multiple tool calls, not just one. The interview also included an optimization angle where I had to think about reducing the number of rounds needed to answer, which felt tied to how I’d structure prompts and how I’d evaluate the overall approach.

What surprised me was how much of the work wasn’t just “make it work,” but