Design a scalable network I/O service
Company: Anthropic
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a scalable and reliable backend service that handles high-volume network I/O (e.g., ingesting and serving large files or streaming data) for millions of users. Define functional and non-functional requirements; propose APIs and data models; estimate capacity and perform back-of-the-envelope calculations; design the high-level architecture (load balancing, stateless services, storage, caching, queues, CDN). Explain strategies for horizontal scaling, performance optimization, and cost controls. Address security and privacy (authentication, authorization, encryption in transit/at rest, rate limiting, multi-tenant isolation). Detail failure handling, retries, idempotency, consistency choices, and disaster recovery. Describe deployment, observability (logging/metrics/tracing), incident response, and rollback. Identify corner cases (e.g., partial uploads, duplicate requests, slow clients, network partitions) and how you would test them.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, highly available network I/O backend, testing competencies in distributed systems, storage architecture, CDN and caching integration, API and data model design, capacity planning, failure handling, observability, and security.