Design a prompt playground
Company: Anthropic
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a prompt playground for developers and prompt engineers.
The product lets users write prompts, choose model settings, run prompts against AI models, stream results, save prompt versions, compare outputs, collaborate with teammates, and inspect cost, latency, and safety issues.
Assume the following scale unless you state different assumptions:
- 100,000 monthly active users.
- 1 million prompt runs per day.
- Some runs stream tokens back to the browser in real time.
- Users belong to workspaces or organizations.
- Prompt content and model outputs may contain sensitive data.
Cover:
1. Core user flows and requirements.
2. APIs and data model.
3. High-level architecture.
4. How prompt execution, streaming, retries, and cancellation work.
5. Versioning, collaboration, and run history.
6. Security, privacy, rate limiting, and abuse prevention.
7. Observability, cost tracking, and scalability tradeoffs.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in large-scale system design, real-time streaming and prompt execution, multi-tenant data modeling, versioning and collaboration workflows, security and privacy controls, observability and cost tracking, and abuse prevention.