Design a Distributed Rate Limiter

Company: Anthropic

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design distributed systems with globally consistent state across multiple servers. It tests system design skills around atomic shared-state operations, reasoning about clock skew, and planning graceful degradation when a dependency fails. Commonly asked to assess practical, production-level architectural judgment rather than pure algorithmic knowledge.