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
•
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
•
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
•
System Design
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
System Design
•
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
•
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
•
System Design
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
System Design
•
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
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a multi-region active-active inference API for Claude. How do you handle routing, state, and failover?
#Global Routing
#High Availability
#Load Balancing
#Multi-Region
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a global rate-limiting service for the Claude API that needs to handle millions of requests per minute, ensuring strict token-based quota enforcement per customer tier.
#Redis
#Distributed Systems
#API Gateway
#Scalability
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a rate-limiting service for our public API that handles sudden spikes in token generation requests across millions of users.
#Rate Limiting
#Redis
#Distributed Systems
#API Gateway
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a multi-region Kubernetes cluster architecture to support distributed LLM training workloads. How do you handle GPU node provisioning, network topology, and fault tolerance?
#Kubernetes
#GPU Compute
#Distributed Systems
#AWS/GCP
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a high-throughput storage solution for feeding petabytes of text data into a distributed training cluster. Compare using S3 directly vs. FSx for Lustre.
#Storage
#High Performance Computing
#AWS
#Data Pipelines
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the observability stack for a fleet of thousands of GPU instances. How do you collect, aggregate, and alert on GPU memory utilization and temperature without overwhelming the metrics backend?
#Observability
#Prometheus
#Grafana
#Scaling
Data Engineer
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
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 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
•
System Design
•
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
•
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
•
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 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
•
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
Data Engineer
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
System Design
•
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
•
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
•
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
•
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 Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Propose an architecture for storing and querying billions of vector embeddings to support internal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) experiments.
#Vector Databases
#Search
#Scalability
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a telemetry and data pipeline system to capture human-in-the-loop feedback (e.g., thumbs up/down, rewritten responses) for RLHF at scale.
#Data Pipelines
#RLHF
#Streaming Data
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an automated evaluation pipeline (Auto-Eval) that uses a stronger model (e.g., Opus) to grade a weaker model's (e.g., Haiku) outputs. How do you detect and mitigate positional bias and verbosity bias in the evaluator?
#Auto-Evals
#LLM-as-a-Judge
#Bias Mitigation
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a telemetry and metrics dashboard system to monitor Claude's real-time refusal rates across different API endpoints and customer tiers.
#Data Architecture
#Monitoring
#Streaming
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a data pipeline to ingest, clean, and deduplicate 100TB of web-scraped text for LLM pre-training?
#Big Data
#Data Engineering
#Spark
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an evaluation system to continuously benchmark Claude against competitor models (like GPT-4) using both automated metrics and human-in-the-loop.
#MLOps
#Evaluation
#Human-in-the-loop
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a system to track and attribute compute costs (GPU hours) to specific research experiments, model runs, and individual data scientists.
#Data Modeling
#Cloud Infrastructure
#Analytics
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a telemetry and analytics system to monitor Claude's response latency, token generation speed, and output quality in real-time.
#Data Pipelines
#Real-time Analytics
#Monitoring
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a data pipeline to continuously evaluate model drift and degradation over time?
#MLOps
#Model Drift
#Data Engineering
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an anomaly detection system to identify sudden spikes in API token usage that could indicate a compromised key or a scraping attack.
#Anomaly Detection
#Security
#Time Series
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a CI/CD pipeline for a massive monorepo containing both ML model weights and application code. How do you optimize build and deployment times?
#CI/CD
#Monorepo
#Performance Optimization
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the infrastructure for serving a large language model like Claude, ensuring high availability, low latency, and efficient GPU utilization.
#Infrastructure
#GPU Provisioning
#High Availability
#Load Balancing
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a GitOps workflow using ArgoCD or Flux for deploying microservices. How do you handle environment promotion (Dev -> Staging -> Prod)?
#GitOps
#CI/CD
#Kubernetes
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
You are tasked with migrating a critical, high-traffic service from AWS to GCP. How do you plan and execute this migration with zero downtime?
#Cloud Migration
#Networking
#Databases
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to securely ingest, sanitize, and store petabytes of training data from external sources.
#Data Engineering
#Security
#Storage
#Scale
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a highly available, secure egress proxy architecture for our internal VPCs to ensure outbound traffic is strictly filtered and logged.
#Networking
#Security
#AWS/GCP
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design an observability stack to monitor the health and performance of thousands of distributed GPU training jobs?
#Observability
#Prometheus
#Grafana
#Distributed Systems
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster for our AI researchers, ensuring strict network isolation and resource quotas between different research teams?
#Kubernetes
#Security
#Networking
#Multi-tenancy
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a system to handle file uploads (e.g., large PDFs or datasets) from the client to the server for Claude to analyze, including progress indicators and resumable uploads.
#File Uploads
#Chunking
#UX
#Network
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a robust frontend caching layer for LLM responses to avoid redundant API calls when a user navigates back and forth through their chat history.
#Caching
#State Management
#Performance
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the frontend architecture for the Claude web application. Focus on state management for chat histories, handling real-time streaming responses, and offline capabilities.
#Architecture
#State Management
#Real-time
#Offline Storage
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an internal data labeling and evaluation tool for RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). The tool needs to display two model outputs side-by-side and allow researchers to annotate specific spans of text.
#UX/UI
#Data Handling
#Component Design
#Internal Tools
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a telemetry and error tracking system for the frontend that helps engineers debug issues without capturing or logging sensitive user prompts or PII.
#Observability
#Privacy
#Error Handling
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time collaborative prompt engineering playground where multiple users can edit a prompt and see model outputs simultaneously.
#CRDTs
#WebSockets
#Collaboration
#Concurrency
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the frontend for a model evaluation dashboard that needs to render charts and tables for millions of data points efficiently.
#Data Visualization
#Web Workers
#Canvas/WebGL
#Pagination
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the backend architecture for Claude's chat interface. Focus specifically on how you would handle low-latency streaming of tokens to the client while simultaneously persisting the conversation history to a database.
#Architecture
#Streaming
#Database Design
#Concurrency
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed queue system to manage LLM inference requests. It must prioritize paid tier users over free tier users during high load, while preventing free tier starvation.
#Queueing Theory
#Distributed Systems
#Fairness
#Load Balancing
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an A/B testing framework specifically for evaluating different versions of an LLM prompt or model weights in production, measuring both user engagement and safety metrics.
#Experimentation
#Analytics
#Routing
#Data Engineering
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system for users to upload, manage, and query against their own custom datasets (up to 10GB per user) within a chat interface. How do you ensure isolation and fast retrieval?
#Multi-tenancy
#Storage
#Search
#Security
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a usage billing system for an LLM API that charges based on both input and output tokens. It must handle millions of requests per minute and ensure customers are never overcharged.
#Billing
#Distributed Systems
#Event Sourcing
#Idempotency
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable document ingestion pipeline that extracts text from user-uploaded PDFs, chunks it, generates embeddings, and stores it in a vector database for RAG.
#Pipelines
#Vector Databases
#Asynchronous Processing
#RAG
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an internal annotation tool for researchers to rate and compare model responses (RLHF). It needs to handle concurrent edits, offline support, and high data integrity.
#Internal Tools
#Offline First
#Concurrency
#Data Integrity
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to handle prompt injection detection. This system must evaluate user input before it reaches the core LLM inference engine, adding no more than 50ms of latency.
#Security
#Low Latency
#Microservices
#Machine Learning
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a telemetry and logging system for LLM outputs that allows researchers to query for safety violations or model hallucinations, without compromising user privacy or storing PII.
#Privacy
#Data Pipelines
#Security
#Analytics
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design the distributed training pipeline for a 100B+ parameter model across 10,000 GPUs?
#Distributed Training
#Megatron-LM
#DeepSpeed
#Network Topology
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an inference API for a model like Claude that handles high concurrency, minimizes Time to First Token (TTFT), and maximizes throughput.
#API Design
#Inference
#Batching
#Latency
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed training system for a 100B+ parameter model across 1000 GPUs. How do you handle network topology and parallelism strategies?
#Distributed Training
#Networking
#Parallelism
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a reward modeling pipeline to penalize evasive answers (e.g., 'As an AI...') while maintaining the model's helpfulness and harmlessness.
#Reward Modeling
#Alignment
#Data Pipeline
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to continuously evaluate a production LLM for red-teaming vulnerabilities and prompt injection attacks.
#Red Teaming
#Security
#Evaluation Pipelines
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a data pipeline to deduplicate, filter, and tokenize a multi-terabyte web scraping dataset for LLM pretraining.
#Data Engineering
#Big Data
#MinHash
#Pretraining
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an inference API for a large language model. Focus specifically on how you would handle continuous batching and manage the KV-cache efficiently to maximize throughput.
#Inference
#Continuous Batching
#KV Cache
#PagedAttention
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed training system for a 100B+ parameter language model. How would you partition the model across GPUs using tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism?
#Distributed Training
#3D Parallelism
#GPU Architecture
#Megatron-LM
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an inference system for Claude that can efficiently handle 100k+ token context windows while serving thousands of concurrent users.
#LLM Serving
#KV Caching
#PagedAttention
#Dynamic Batching
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
How would you scale the Claude web interface to handle a 10x spike in traffic during a major new model release?
#Scalability
#Load Balancing
#Queueing
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable A/B testing framework specifically for evaluating different versions of a system prompt for Claude.
#A/B Testing
#Experimentation
#LLM Evaluation
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
How would you design a caching layer for LLM responses to reduce compute costs for frequently asked questions?
#Caching
#Cost Optimization
#Semantic Search
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to detect and mitigate prompt injection attacks at scale for our API customers.
#Security
#API Infrastructure
#Adversarial AI
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
A major enterprise customer wants to fine-tune Claude on their proprietary, highly sensitive data. How do you design the product offering to ensure privacy and safety?
#Data Privacy
#Fine-Tuning
#Enterprise Architecture
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
Design the architecture for a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system for an enterprise customer wanting to search their internal knowledge base.
#RAG
#Vector Databases
#Architecture
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
How would you design a rate-limiting system for the Anthropic API to handle sudden spikes in traffic while ensuring fairness among different pricing tiers?
#Infrastructure
#API Design
#Scalability
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a feedback loop system to continuously improve Claude's responses based on implicit and explicit user interactions on Claude.ai.
#Data Pipelines
#User Feedback
#Continuous Improvement
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
If you were the PM for Claude's system prompts, how would you design a system to version control and deploy changes to them without disrupting enterprise clients who rely on consistent behavior?
#Version Control
#Deployment
#Enterprise Software
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design the telemetry and logging architecture for Claude user interactions to improve model safety and evaluations, without violating strict user data privacy requirements?
#Privacy
#Data Logging
#Safety
#Compliance
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a rate-limiting and quota management system for the Anthropic API that prevents malicious abuse while ensuring enterprise customers experience zero throttling.
#API Design
#Rate Limiting
#Enterprise Requirements
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a rate-limiting strategy for the Anthropic API that maximizes revenue while preventing platform abuse?
#API Design
#Rate Limiting
#Monetization
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the backend architecture for a feature that allows users to upload and query 100-page PDF documents using Claude.
#Document Processing
#Vector Databases
#Architecture
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a telemetry system to monitor model latency and token generation speed across different geographic regions.
#Observability
#Metrics
#Distributed Systems
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design the backend architecture for Claude.ai's chat interface. How would you handle conversation history, branching conversations (editing a previous prompt), and streaming responses to the frontend?
#API Design
#WebSockets/SSE
#Database Schema
#State Management
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a low-latency inference API for a Large Language Model like Claude. How do you handle request batching, streaming responses, and model weight distribution across GPUs?
#Distributed Systems
#Machine Learning Infrastructure
#Latency Optimization
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a telemetry and logging system for tracking model hallucinations or safety violations in production. The system must handle millions of events per minute without impacting the critical path of the inference API.
#Logging
#Asynchronous Processing
#Big Data
#Observability
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed Key-Value store specifically optimized for caching LLM prompt embeddings. It needs to support high read throughput and fast eviction.
#Distributed Systems
#Caching
#Consistent Hashing
#Replication
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a system for securely storing and querying user conversation history with Claude. The system must ensure strict privacy, support fast retrieval for context windows, and comply with data deletion requests.
#Databases
#Privacy
#Security
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a scalable model evaluation framework. Researchers need to run thousands of benchmark tests (MMLU, HumanEval) against new model checkpoints daily.
#Task Queues
#Scalability
#CI/CD
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to monitor, detect, and block prompt injection attacks in real-time across millions of API requests per minute.
#Security
#Stream Processing
#Low Latency
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed data pipeline to process petabytes of raw web text for LLM pre-training. It needs to filter out PII, deduplicate documents, and tokenize the text.
#Big Data
#Data Pipelines
#MapReduce
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed data processing pipeline to ingest, deduplicate, and filter petabytes of web scraping data for LLM pre-training.
#Data Pipelines
#MapReduce
#Storage
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a global API rate limiting system for Anthropic's enterprise customers. It must be highly available, have minimal latency impact, and strictly enforce limits across multiple geographic regions.
#Distributed Systems
#Redis
#Rate Limiting
#Consistency
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a streaming inference API architecture. How do you route incoming requests to available GPU workers, handle worker failures mid-stream, and stream the generated tokens back to the client?
#Load Balancing
#Streaming
#Fault Tolerance
#GPU Infrastructure
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a high-throughput LLM inference service. How would you handle continuous batching, KV cache memory management, and streaming responses back to the client?
#ML Infrastructure
#Distributed Systems
#GPU Memory Management
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a rate-limiting service that supports multiple dimensions: per user, per organization, and per IP address, with different limits for each.
#API Design
#Redis
#Scalability
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time collaborative prompt engineering tool (similar to Google Docs for prompts) where multiple users can edit, test, and version-control prompts simultaneously.
#Real-time Systems
#Operational Transformation
#WebSockets
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an asynchronous batch processing system for offline LLM inference (e.g., processing millions of documents for embeddings).
#Batch Processing
#Message Queues
#Scalability
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an A/B testing framework specifically for evaluating new versions of an LLM. How do you route traffic, measure qualitative metrics (like helpfulness), and ensure statistical significance?
#A/B Testing
#Data Engineering
#Analytics
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a telemetry and monitoring system for a cluster of 10,000 GPUs. It needs to detect hardware failures, thermal throttling, and network bottlenecks in real-time.
#Monitoring
#Distributed Systems
#Hardware Infrastructure
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed caching layer for LLM responses to serve identical queries instantly. How do you handle cache invalidation, semantic similarity, and high read/write throughput?
#Caching
#Vector Databases
#Distributed Systems
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a scalable chat history storage system for a consumer-facing LLM application (like Claude.ai) that allows fast retrieval of recent messages and efficient storage of long contexts.
#Databases
#Caching
#Data Modeling
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a system to detect and block prompt injection attacks in real-time across millions of API requests per day.
#Security
#Stream Processing
#Microservices
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an asynchronous batch processing system for offline LLM generation tasks (e.g., summarizing millions of documents). How do you handle retries, partial failures, and dynamic scaling of GPU workers?
#Batch Processing
#Message Queues
#Fault Tolerance
#GPU Infrastructure
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a multi-tenant Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for enterprise clients. How do you ensure data isolation, scalable vector search, and low-latency retrieval?
#Vector Databases
#Security
#Multi-tenancy
#Search
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to evaluate LLM outputs for safety and alignment (Constitutional AI pipeline). How would you architect a high-throughput asynchronous pipeline that runs multiple smaller classifier models on Claude's outputs before returning them to the user?
#Microservices
#Stream Processing
#Latency Optimization
#Machine Learning Infrastructure
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed web crawler tailored for gathering LLM training data. How do you handle deduplication at a massive scale, respect robots.txt, and prioritize high-quality domains?
#Distributed Systems
#Message Queues
#Hashing
#Data Pipelines
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Design the database schema for a chat application like Claude. It must support users, chat sessions, individual messages, and the ability to 'edit and retry' a message, which creates a new branch of the conversation.
#SQL
#Database Schema
#Trees
#Data Modeling
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