Anthropic
AI safety and research company behind Claude, focusing on constitutional AI.
5 Rounds
~20 Days
Very Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
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medium
Implement an in-memory Event Bus (Pub/Sub system) where publishers can emit events and subscribers can listen to specific event types using regex patterns.
#Design Patterns
#Concurrency
#String Matching
Backend Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable rate-limiting service for the Claude API that can handle millions of requests per minute across globally distributed data centers.
#Distributed Systems
#Redis
#High Availability
Backend Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a real-time streaming inference API for an LLM. How do you handle connection drops, partial token generation, and backpressure?
#Server-Sent Events (SSE)
#WebSockets
#Streaming
#Network Protocols
Backend Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed prompt caching layer to optimize LLM inference costs. How do you handle cache invalidation and eviction for variable-length context windows?
#Caching
#Distributed Systems
#Optimization
Backend Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a system to schedule and batch LLM inference requests across a cluster of GPUs to maximize throughput while respecting latency SLAs.
#Batching
#Resource Scheduling
#Queueing Theory
Backend Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a telemetry and observability system for LLM safety guardrails. It needs to ingest billions of events per day and allow for real-time alerting on policy violations.
#Data Ingestion
#Stream Processing
#Observability
Backend Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design an asynchronous web scraper for training data collection. It must respect robots.txt, handle rate limits, and scale to scrape millions of domains daily.
#Web Scraping
#Distributed Systems
#Concurrency
Backend Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design an abuse detection system that monitors API usage patterns to detect and block malicious actors (e.g., prompt injection attacks, DDOS, account sharing) in near real-time.
#Security
#Stream Processing
#Machine Learning Infrastructure
Backend Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a highly available key-value store to maintain user session history (chat logs) for Claude. It must support high write throughput and fast sequential reads.
#Databases
#Replication
#Data Modeling
Backend Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a system to handle long-running asynchronous model fine-tuning jobs. How do you manage state, handle node failures, and provide progress updates to users?
#Job Scheduling
#State Machines
#Fault Tolerance
Backend Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a Vector Database architecture for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). How do you scale the index for billions of embeddings while maintaining low-latency ANN (Approximate Nearest Neighbor) search?
#Vector Databases
#Machine Learning Infrastructure
#Search
Backend Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a distributed ID generator that generates unique, k-sortable (time-ordered) 64-bit integers at a scale of millions per second.
#Distributed Systems
#Algorithms
#Scalability
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.