Coding & Algorithms interview questions

Showing 361–390 of 3276 results

• Find the Slowest Function from Profiler EventsMedium

  This question evaluates the ability to interpret time-ordered profiler event logs, compute inclusive and exclusive function runtimes, reason about call-stack semantics, and recognize anomalies such as recursion, cycles, missing end events, or non-returning functions.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Fix a Corrupted Bootloader InstructionMedium

  Simulate a virtual machine's instruction set, detect an infinite loop cycle, and find the single instruction modification (between jmp and nop) that allows the program to terminate normally.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Generate Function Profiling Events from Stack SamplesMedium

  Generate function start and end events from timestamped stack samples, including independently debounced frames across consecutive samples. Address transient appearances and absences, changing stack suffixes, shared timestamps, deep stacks, end-of-input behavior, complexity, and online processing.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Generate outputs for images and pipelinesMedium

  This question evaluates algorithmic and systems engineering skills related to batch image processing, parallelization, I/O versus CPU trade-offs, and deterministic output association within the Coding & Algorithms domain.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement Parallel Image ProcessingMedium

  This question evaluates competency in concurrent and parallel processing, practical image manipulation with Python libraries (Pillow), resource management for memory and file I/O, robust error handling, and performance measurement.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement Persistent Memoization LRU CacheHard

  This problem tests your ability to design a decorator that memoizes function results using an LRU policy while ensuring the cache survives process restarts via disk serialization.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement Python LRU cache with args and persistenceMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design and implement an LRU cache in Python that supports variable-length positional and keyword arguments with canonical, deterministic hashing for semantically equivalent calls and O(1) get/put via a hash map plus a doubly linked list; it falls under the Coding & Algorithms domain and primarily tests practical implementation skills, API robustness, hashing/equality subtleties, and algorithmic complexity guarantees. The persistence follow-up evaluates understanding of serialization and storage design — on-disk formats, versioning, and atomic write strategies — and compares trade-offs between binary pickle and JSON-based serialization in terms of security, compatibility, and performance, reflecting both conceptual design and practical system-level considerations.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement Python LRU cache with varargsMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to implement an LRU caching mechanism in Python, including decorator design, argument canonicalization for positional args, *args, and **kwargs, handling unhashable inputs, eviction semantics, cache metadata operations (clear, cache_info), and JSON-based persistence and versioning.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement Task Management and Duplicate DetectionMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design an in-memory task management system with concurrency-aware state tracking and implement an efficient file-deduplication routine using hashing.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement a Banking SystemMedium

  This question evaluates skills in designing and implementing a stateful in-memory banking system, covering account modeling, transfer lifecycle and expiration handling, balance management, and tracking aggregate outgoing amounts.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement a Batch Image ProcessorMedium

  Design and implement an in-memory image transformation engine that applies sequential operations (grayscale, brightness scaling, nearest-neighbor resizing) over a batch of images efficiently.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement a Least-Recently-Used CacheMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design and implement an efficient in-memory cache with eviction behavior, testing understanding of data structure selection, state management, and time/space complexity under capacity constraints.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement a Longest-Match TokenizerHard

  Design and implement a greedy longest-match text tokenizer that validates vocabulary, supports configurable unknown-token coalescing, and emits token IDs alongside their exact substring matches.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement a Parallel Image ProcessorMedium

  Design and implement a concurrent batch image processor that executes a sequence of matrix transforms across worker threads or processes while isolating per-job failures.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement a Simplified DNS ResolverHard

  Implement an in-memory DNS resolver supporting A and CNAME record lookups, domain name normalization, TTL expiration, and CNAME alias chain cycle detection.

  AnthropicMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Implement a Time-Aware Task ManagerHard

  Design an in-memory task manager supporting per-user task versioning, time-to-live (TTL) expiration, and point-in-time historical queries.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement a hierarchical file storeHard

  This problem tests your ability to design a hierarchical file system data structure and implement operations for directory traversal, file manipulation, and path normalization.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement a web crawler using a provided APIMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a multi-threaded web crawler that efficiently traverses a site while respecting domain constraints and avoiding redundant work.

  AnthropicMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement an extensible prefix treeMedium

  This question evaluates the ability to design and implement an extensible prefix tree (trie), covering competencies in Unicode-aware string handling, memory and time optimization, concurrency or thread-safety considerations, and support for operations like insert, search, startsWith, countPrefix and erase.

  AnthropicMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement an in-memory DB with TTL backup/restoreMedium

  Implement an in-memory nested key-value store supporting field-level time-to-live (TTL) expiration and snapshot backup/restore operations.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Implement cluster status trackerMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's competence in data structures and algorithms for time-ordered state tracking, time-series indexing, conflict resolution (last-write-wins), memory-efficient storage, and concurrent system behavior under high update rates.

  AnthropicMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement crawler, dedup, and persistent LRUMedium

  This interview question evaluates algorithm design, data structures, correctness, complexity, edge cases, and implementation details in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Implement crawler, dedup, and persistent LRU states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement file deduplication at scaleMedium

  Implement streaming file deduplication that filters by size, fingerprint and hash, then compares bytes to rule out hash collisions. It covers large-file chunking, batched disk I/O, parallelizing across cores or machines, a dry-run report, and hard links that never cross devices. Follow-ups turn it into a command-line tool that handles symbolic links, unreadable files, error cases, and options to move or delete duplicates.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement hostname-restricted web crawlerMedium

  This question evaluates skills in graph traversal and cycle detection, hostname-based filtering, URL parsing, and basic network error handling. Commonly asked in Coding & Algorithms interviews, it assesses algorithmic reasoning about traversal strategy and complexity (time and space) analysis while balancing conceptual understanding with practical implementation details.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Implement staircase printing and distributed mode/medianHard

  This set of problems evaluates implementation correctness and attention to formatting for a staircase-printing routine alongside distributed-algorithms reasoning for computing a global mode/median, testing algorithmic thinking, I/O handling, synchronization, and communication-cost trade-offs in the Coding & Algorithms domain.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Implement thread-safe blocking queueMedium

  This question evaluates competency in concurrent programming, synchronization primitives, and implementation of thread-safe bounded blocking queues within the Coding & Algorithms domain.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• In-Memory Key-Value Database with Nested TransactionsMedium

  Design an in-memory key-value store supporting nested transactions with begin, commit, rollback, get, set, and delete operations.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• LRU CacheMedium

  This question tests the ability to combine a hash map and a doubly linked list to implement an LRU cache with O(1) performance for both get and put operations.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Path Resolution with Symbolic LinksMedium

  Implement a filesystem path resolution function that normalizes paths containing '.', '..', and symbolic links while detecting cycles.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Same-Domain Web Crawl (BFS)Medium

  Implement a breadth-first search crawler that traverses pages starting from a seed URL, filtering for pages sharing the same domain and properly deduplicating visited URLs.

  AnthropicSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite