How do you review a design document?
Company: Anthropic
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
You have an interview on your agenda titled **“Design Doc Review.”**
You are given a written design document for a new feature/service (or a major change to an existing system). In the interview, you must review it and give feedback.
What process and checklist would you use to review the doc?
Include how you would evaluate:
- Requirements and scope (functional + non-functional)
- Architecture and data flow
- Correctness, reliability, security/privacy
- Scalability and performance
- Operational readiness (monitoring, alerting, on-call, runbooks)
- Testing plan and rollout/migration plan
- Tradeoffs and open questions
Quick Answer: This question evaluates proficiency in reviewing design documents, including requirements and scope, architecture and data flow, correctness and security, scalability and performance, testing and rollout plans, operational readiness, and trade-off analysis.