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
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a Python function to efficiently find near-duplicate text documents in a large corpus. You do not need to implement the full distributed system, but implement the core hashing logic (e.g., MinHash) and explain how you would scale it across a cluster.
#Hashing
#Text Processing
#Optimization
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python program that takes a massive JSONL file of Wikipedia articles and chunks the text into overlapping segments of exactly 512 tokens (assume a simple whitespace tokenizer for this exercise), while preserving the document metadata in each chunk. The file is larger than available RAM.
#Generators
#Memory Management
#Text Processing
Data Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Implement a rate limiter in Python for our API. The rate limiter should allow a user to make up to N requests per minute, but also enforce a maximum of M tokens generated per day. How would you make this distributed across multiple API servers?
#Data Structures
#Concurrency
#API Design
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python function to process a 500GB JSONL file of raw text data. You need to filter out documents containing specific blocklisted keywords, compute a basic word count across the valid documents, and output the clean data to a new file. You have 8GB of RAM.
#Python
#Generators
#Memory Management
#I/O
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Implement a distributed rate limiter in Python. Assume this will be used to throttle API requests for our Claude models based on a user's tier (e.g., tokens per minute).
#Concurrency
#Redis
#Token Bucket
#Distributed Systems
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given a list of overlapping time intervals representing periods when a GPU cluster was fully utilized, write a function to merge all overlapping intervals and return the total duration of full utilization.
#Sorting
#Intervals
#Python
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Implement a Trie (Prefix Tree) data structure in Python. Then, write a method to find all words in the Trie that share a given prefix. Explain how this relates to LLM tokenization.
#Data Structures
#Trees
#String Manipulation
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
You have a stream of incoming chat logs. Write a Python algorithm to maintain the top K most frequent words over a sliding window of 1 hour.
#Streaming Algorithms
#Heaps
#Sliding Window
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script that implements a custom MapReduce framework using the `multiprocessing` library to count the frequency of n-grams in a large corpus of text files.
#Concurrency
#MapReduce
#Python
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Given a directed acyclic graph (DAG) representing data pipeline dependencies, write a Python function to execute the tasks in parallel where possible, respecting the dependency order. Assume each task is a sleep function.
#Graphs
#Topological Sort
#Concurrency
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Given a massive string of text, write an algorithm to find the longest repeating substring. This is a simplified version of finding duplicated boilerplate text in web scrapes.
#String Algorithms
#Suffix Arrays
#Dynamic Programming
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python generator function to efficiently parse a 500GB JSONL file containing web crawl data, filtering out documents that do not contain a specific set of keywords, without loading the entire file into memory.
#Python
#Generators
#Memory Management
#File I/O
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Given a massive dataset of text documents, implement a MinHash and Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) algorithm in Python to identify near-duplicate documents. How would you scale this across a distributed cluster?
#Hashing
#Deduplication
#Big Data
#Distributed Systems
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a function that takes a stream of text and a target keyword, and returns a sliding window of N tokens before and after every occurrence of the keyword. Handle edge cases like overlapping windows.
#Sliding Window
#Text Processing
#Queues
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
We need to create a pre-training dataset with a specific language distribution (e.g., 60% English, 20% Spanish, 20% French). Write a script to sample proportionally from a massive, unsorted stream of multilingual documents.
#Sampling
#Probability
#Streaming Algorithms
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a list of text spans representing PII (Personally Identifiable Information) redactions in a document, where each span is a tuple of (start_index, end_index), write a function to merge all overlapping spans.
#Intervals
#Arrays
#Sorting
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Implement a thread-safe Token Bucket rate limiter in Python. This will be used to throttle incoming requests to our data ingestion API to prevent overwhelming the downstream Kafka cluster.
#Concurrency
#Rate Limiting
#System Design
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a program to compute the top K most frequent tokens in a continuous, infinite stream of text. Optimize for both time and space complexity.
#Heaps
#Hash Maps
#Streaming
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Given two large documents, write an algorithm to find the longest common contiguous substring. This is used in our pipeline to detect data contamination between training and evaluation sets.
#Dynamic Programming
#Suffix Trees
#Strings
Difficulty Radar
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Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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