Anthropic Software Engineer System Design Interview Questions
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Optimize HTTP requests for speed and limits
You are building a service that needs to send HTTP requests to a large number of URLs (for example, a simple web crawler or data fetcher). The naive i...
Design distributed median and mode
Distributed System Design: Global Median and Global Mode at Massive Scale Context You are designing a distributed analytics system that must compute t...
Describe a Python design-and-coding approach in Colab
Python Coding-and-Design Exercise in Google Colab Task You are assigned a generic coding-and-design exercise to be completed in Python using Google Co...
Design a scalable, reliable system
System Design: Global Photo/Video File Storage and Sharing ("CloudDrive") Context Design a scalable, highly reliable consumer service where users uplo...
Design a desktop AI chat frontend
Design a Frontend Architecture for a Cross-Platform Desktop Conversational AI App Context You are designing the frontend architecture for a cross-plat...
Guide and override compiler optimizations
Guiding a Compiler for a VLIW-like Backend You are optimizing hot loops for a VLIW-like target (e.g., DSP/AI accelerator) where the compiler sometimes...
Design a concurrent web crawler
System Design: Web Crawler (Single-threaded and Concurrent) Context Design and implement a web crawler that starts from a set of seed URLs and explore...
Schedule instructions on a VLIW pipeline
VLIW Instruction Scheduling and Software Pipelining You are given a 4-issue VLIW machine with these functional units and latencies: - 2 ALUs (ALU late...
Scale crawler with thread pool
Concurrent Web Crawler — Bounded Thread Pool, Thread-Safe Frontier, Dedupe, Politeness, and Trade-offs You are refactoring an existing single-threaded...
Design a concurrent web crawler
System Design: Concurrent Web Crawler (Threads) You are asked to design and implement a basic web crawler that fetches pages concurrently using a thre...
Design production-ready dedup service
System Design: Production-Ready File Deduplication Service Context Design a multi-tenant cloud service that stores files and achieves space savings vi...
Optimize a compute kernel with a simulator
Performance Optimization Plan for a Compute Kernel Context You are given: - A compute kernel (single critical function or set of loops) to optimize. -...
Design a scalable network I/O service
System Design: High-Volume Network I/O Backend (Files and Streaming) Context Design a backend service that supports millions of users uploading and do...
Identify and mitigate deduplication program risks
System Design: Robust File Deduplication in the Real World Context You are designing a file deduplication tool that scans large directory trees on one...
Implement a thread-safe producer–consumer buffer
Bounded Blocking Buffer with Shutdown and Timeouts You are asked to design and implement a thread-safe, fixed-capacity producer–consumer buffer that s...
Design a scalable web crawler
System Design: Scalable Web Crawler Context Design a production-ready web crawler that discovers and downloads publicly accessible web pages at intern...