Design a high-concurrency LLM inference service
Company: Anthropic
Role: Software Engineer
Category: ML System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a high-concurrency LLM inference platform, assessing competencies in GPU utilization and memory management (KV cache), batching and scheduling strategies, request splitting/merging, multi-model/version routing, streaming versus non-streaming output handling, lifecycle (cold start/hot model) management, and cost-versus-latency trade-offs. Commonly asked in the ML System Design domain to gauge practical system-design skills and operational reasoning, it tests practical application—architecture, algorithms, scheduling policies, and observability—while requiring conceptual understanding of trade-offs between latency, throughput, memory, and cost.