Anthropic Software Engineer Interview Questions
Anthropic Software Engineer interview questions tend to reflect the company’s dual focus on building reliable, high-quality software and on safe, responsible AI. Expect a blend of practical algorithmic coding, systems design, and mission-aligned behavioral or safety reasoning. Interviewers often probe clarity of thought and written communication as much as raw coding speed, and you should be ready to explain trade-offs, failure modes, and how you would make a system robust in real-world conditions. For interview preparation, plan for a multi-step process: an initial recruiter screen, a timed coding exercise or take-home, a hiring-manager conversation, and a longer onsite loop that mixes coding, design, and culture-fit questions. Prepare by practicing medium-to-hard coding problems with an emphasis on clean, modular solutions, refreshing distributed-systems and API design fundamentals, and producing concise one-page design notes or safety-minded postmortems you can discuss. Balance technical polish with concrete stories of impact and collaboration; reviewers are looking for engineers who can ship reliable systems, reason about edge cases, and communicate trade-offs clearly.
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Design a distributed web crawler
Problem Design a web crawler that starts from one or more seed URLs and continuously discovers and fetches pages. Requirements - Inputs: One or more s...
Design stack with O(1) minimum query
Design a stack-like data structure that supports the following operations, each in O(1) time: - push(x): push integer x onto the stack - pop(): remove...
Implement staircase printing and distributed mode/median
Problem A: Print a “staircase” pattern Implement a function that prints a staircase with n rows. Input - An integer n (n >= 1) Output - Print n lines....
Generate outputs for images and pipelines
You are given m input images and n processing pipelines. - Each pipeline is an ordered list of k operations (e.g., resize, rotate, crop, blur, color t...
Implement an in-memory DB with TTL backup/restore
Problem Design an in-memory database that stores values in a nested structure: - key (string) → field (string) → value (string) - Each (key, field) en...
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...
Find duplicate files and apply image operations
Part A — Find duplicate files by content You are given a list of directory records. Each record is a string describing a directory path followed by on...
Design guardrails and fallback for LLM reliability
You operate a production application that uses an LLM to generate user-facing outputs (text actions, advice, summaries). The model is non-deterministi...
Design a single- and multi-threaded web crawler
Web Crawler (single-threaded, then multi-threaded) You are given: - A starting URL startUrl (e.g., "http://news.example.com/a/index.html"). - An inter...
Implement file deduplication at scale
Write a program to deduplicate files in a very large directory tree. Identify groups of identical files without loading entire files into memory. Outl...
Design an in-memory banking service
Design an in-memory banking service supporting timestamped operations and edge-case semantics. Implement: ( 1) create_account(id, t): Create a new acc...
Detect duplicate files efficiently
You are given access to a very large file system containing file paths and read access to file contents. Design an algorithm to identify groups of fil...
How would you scale batch image pipelines?
Design a system to process m input images with n pipelines, producing m×n outputs. - Pipelines are sequences of image operations (resize/rotate/filter...
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...
Optimize a core kernel for throughput
You are given a mocked “core kernel” function (similar in spirit to a GPU kernel / tight compute loop) that is functionally correct but slow. Task - O...
Parse and Reconstruct Stack Trace
Given a multi-line stack trace string from a single thread (e.g., each frame is in the form 'at Module::Function(file:line)'), design and implement a ...
Estimate VRAM and compare model parallelism
You are reasoning about GPU memory and parallelism for a transformer-like workload dominated by matrix multiplications. Part 1: Can one matmul’s tenso...
Design a low-latency ML inference API
System Design: Low‑Latency ML Inference API (Real‑Time) Context You are designing an in‑region, synchronous inference API used by product surfaces (e....
Design an LLM-based binary classifier
Design a Binary Text Classifier Using Only a Log-Probability Scoring Helper Context You are building a binary text classifier without fine-tuning. You...
Discuss culture and collaboration
Behavioral & Leadership: Team Culture, Feedback, Ambiguity, and Disagree-and-Commit Context: You are interviewing for a Software Engineer role during ...