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
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System Design
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hard
Design a scalable data pipeline to ingest, deduplicate, and filter 50TB of raw web scrape data per day to be used for pre-training a large language model. How do you handle PII scrubbing and ensure high data quality at this scale?
#Distributed Systems
#Data Pipelines
#Data Quality
#MapReduce/Spark
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time monitoring and alerting system for Claude's inference endpoints. The system needs to track latency, error rates, and token generation speed (Time to First Token, Tokens per Second), processing millions of events per minute with sub-second alerting latency.
#Stream Processing
#Kafka
#Observability
#Real-time Analytics
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a data architecture to support automated model evaluations. Every time a new model checkpoint is saved, it needs to be run against 10,000 benchmark datasets. How do you manage the orchestration, store the results, and provide a dashboard for researchers to compare model versions?
#Orchestration
#Airflow/Dagster
#Data Modeling
#CI/CD for ML
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a data ingestion and processing pipeline to handle 10PB of raw web scrape data. The pipeline must perform exact and fuzzy deduplication, remove PII, and format the output into tokenized chunks for LLM pre-training.
#Distributed Systems
#Data Pipelines
#MinHash/LSH
#MapReduce
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time monitoring and alerting system for LLM inference. It needs to track latency, token generation speed, and run a lightweight toxicity classifier on the output stream. How do you handle spikes of 100,000 requests per second?
#Stream Processing
#Kafka
#Real-time Analytics
#Monitoring
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to track data provenance and lineage for Constitutional AI training sets. If a specific document is found to be corrupted, we need to know exactly which model checkpoints were trained on it.
#Data Lineage
#Metadata Management
#Graph Databases
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design an evaluation pipeline that runs 50,000 complex prompts against multiple versions of an LLM daily. The pipeline must aggregate scores, compute regressions, and block model deployment if safety thresholds are breached.
#Batch Processing
#CI/CD for ML
#Airflow/Dagster
Data Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a scalable backend system for collecting RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) data. Human annotators will be comparing two model outputs. The system must ensure no data loss, handle annotator concurrency, and output training-ready datasets.
#Transactional Databases
#Concurrency
#API Design
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed vector embedding storage and retrieval system. Researchers need to perform KNN searches on billions of embeddings generated from our models.
#Vector Databases
#KNN/ANN
#Distributed Systems
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a multi-region active-active data replication system for model checkpoints. Each checkpoint is 100GB, and they are generated every hour. Researchers globally need fast access to the latest checkpoints.
#Data Replication
#Cloud Storage
#Network Optimization
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design an experiment management system to track hyperparameter tuning, dataset versions, and evaluation metrics for thousands of concurrent LLM training runs.
#MLOps
#Database Design
#API Design
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed task queue specifically optimized for scheduling offline batch inference jobs on GPUs. Some jobs take seconds, others take days. GPUs are heterogeneous (e.g., A100s vs H100s).
#Task Queues
#Resource Scheduling
#Distributed Systems
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a data pipeline to ingest, clean, and deduplicate 100TB of raw web crawl data for LLM pre-training. Walk me through the architecture, tools, and how you handle failures.
#Batch Processing
#Data Pipelines
#LLM Training
#Spark
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time monitoring system to track model inference latency and safety filter trigger rates across millions of requests per minute. How do you ensure low latency for the dashboard?
#Streaming
#Monitoring
#Metrics
#Kafka
#Druid/Pinot
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
How would you design a system to handle continuous, high-throughput updates to a vector database used for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) without impacting read performance?
#Vector Databases
#RAG
#Data Sync
#Concurrency
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an automated evaluation pipeline that runs nightly benchmarks on the latest model checkpoints. The pipeline needs to run thousands of prompts, score them using another LLM, and aggregate the results.
#Orchestration
#CI/CD for ML
#Airflow
#Batch Inference
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed data processing framework to tokenize petabytes of text data efficiently. How do you handle vocabulary updates and ensure reproducibility?
#Distributed Systems
#MapReduce
#Tokenization
#Reproducibility
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
How would you architect a data lake at Anthropic to support both ML researchers needing raw text blobs and business analysts needing structured API usage metrics?
#Data Lake
#Architecture
#Storage Formats
#Governance
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a system to track data lineage for datasets used in training Claude. If a researcher finds a toxic output, how do we trace it back to the specific training document?
#Data Lineage
#Governance
#Metadata Management
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a highly scalable web scraper to build a high-quality dataset of academic papers. How do you handle rate limiting, IP bans, and parsing diverse PDF layouts?
#Web Scraping
#Distributed Systems
#Queues
#Unstructured Data
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
How do you handle schema evolution in a massive data pipeline where upstream data formats (like web crawl schemas or partner data) change frequently without notice?
#Schema Evolution
#Data Quality
#Data Contracts
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a system to securely handle, detect, and anonymize PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in petabytes of training datasets before they reach the ML models.
#Security
#PII
#Compliance
#NLP
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