Design Instagram (Feed, Photos, and Friend Recommendations)
Company: Anthropic
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a large-scale, read-heavy social media backend, covering data modeling for follow graphs, media storage, and feed generation. It tests system design skills such as choosing fan-out strategies for feed delivery, handling highly skewed follower distributions, and reasoning about latency and availability trade-offs at scale.