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🎯 Interview Experience

[OpenAI/Anthropic/DeepMind] Patterns I noticed interviewing across several AI labs

AAnonymous6/24/202613 views

Did loops at a bunch of GenAI-heavy companies (labs + a few startups) over the last few months. The patterns that held across almost all of them:

  1. Classic LeetCode is fading: more real-codebase tasks and "work with the model" rounds.
  2. They probe depth on something you claim to know, hard, so pick your resume keywords carefully.
  3. The behavioral / values round carries way more weight than at FAANG, often the actual filter.
  4. Seniors frequently skip the OA via referral, but never the deep-dive.

Single best prep: be able to talk about your own past projects cold. The deep-dive is universal.

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AAnonymous #16/24/2026

Point 1 is so true now. I prepped 200 LeetCode problems and barely used them; every lab wanted me to navigate a real repo or reason with a model instead.

3
AAnonymous #26/25/2026

Point 3 took me three rejections to internalize. I was treating behavioral as the warm-up. It is the interview.

1
AAnonymous (OP)6/25/2026

Yeah, I'd genuinely flip the prep ratio from what most LeetCode-era advice says. Less grind, more "can I defend my own decisions and work fluently with a model."