The Technical Use-Case Screen
Explore how to approach the technical use-case screen in Anthropic's FDE interview by designing workflows that solve customer problems with Claude. Learn to clarify requirements, employ MCP for tool integration, ensure reliability with context management, and demonstrate production-grade judgment through live problem-solving sessions.
The technical use-case screen is the round that looks most like the FDE job itself. Instead of an algorithm puzzle, it presents a customer problem that Claude should help solve, usually built around tools and often around the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for connecting Claude to external systems. Many candidates work through the problem with live access to Claude.
What the interviewer wants to see is how we would ship a Claude workflow that holds up in production. A design that stays consistent across runs, survives a task larger than one context window, and fails in ways the customer can detect is what counts.
Those priorities shape what the interviewer listens for.
What the screen assesses
The screen looks at six abilities.
Deployment reasoning: Turning a customer request into a workflow that fits the customer’s systems, data, and constraints.
MCP fluency: Deciding which systems become tools, what each tool exposes, and how Claude connects to them.
Reliability focus: Designing for consistent output, detectable failures, and graceful handling of bad inputs.
Context management: Handling tasks whose data or history exceeds what fits in a single context window.
Prompting approach: Structuring ...