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Implement crawler and file deduplication

Last updated: Apr 19, 2026

Quick Overview

This question evaluates competencies in concurrent programming, web crawling and graph traversal, thread safety, rate limiting, I/O-efficient file deduplication using hashing, and scalable system design within the Coding & Algorithms domain.

  • medium
  • Anthropic
  • Coding & Algorithms
  • Software Engineer

Implement crawler and file deduplication

Company: Anthropic

Role: Software Engineer

Category: Coding & Algorithms

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

The interview included two coding exercises: 1. Build a web crawler starting from a seed URL within a single domain. First implement a single-threaded version that visits each reachable page at most once and returns the discovered URLs. Then extend it to a multithreaded version. Discuss duplicate suppression, thread safety, termination, rate limiting, and how to handle slow or failing pages. 2. Build a file deduplication tool for a directory tree. Detect duplicates efficiently by first grouping files by size and then confirming duplicates with a content hash. Discuss tradeoffs between I/O-bound and CPU-bound work, how to process very large files, how to scale to huge numbers of files, and how to support near-real-time detection when files are added or modified.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates competencies in concurrent programming, web crawling and graph traversal, thread safety, rate limiting, I/O-efficient file deduplication using hashing, and scalable system design within the Coding & Algorithms domain.

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Anthropic logo
Anthropic
Feb 28, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
Coding & Algorithms
10
0
Coding Console
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The interview included two coding exercises:

  1. Build a web crawler starting from a seed URL within a single domain. First implement a single-threaded version that visits each reachable page at most once and returns the discovered URLs. Then extend it to a multithreaded version. Discuss duplicate suppression, thread safety, termination, rate limiting, and how to handle slow or failing pages.
  2. Build a file deduplication tool for a directory tree. Detect duplicates efficiently by first grouping files by size and then confirming duplicates with a content hash. Discuss tradeoffs between I/O-bound and CPU-bound work, how to process very large files, how to scale to huge numbers of files, and how to support near-real-time detection when files are added or modified.

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