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System Design Interview Questions
Practice 9403 coding, system design and machine learning questions from 546 companies, sorted by role, topic and interview round. Every question has step-by-step hints, a code runner that supports 8 languages and an AI mentor; members also get the full solution walkthrough.
- 9403
- Questions
- 546
- Companies
- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 61–90 of 721 results
- AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Resumable, Parallel Fetcher for Huge Dataset Releases
Design a node-side fetcher that downloads multi-terabyte dataset releases in parallel byte ranges, resumes from verified pieces after crashes, and atomically publishes only complete releases. Tests manifest design, range-request validation, durable progress tracking, and atomic filesystem publication.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsstorage - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Shared API Request Workbench With Versioned Runs
Design a team tool where engineers co-edit a shared collection of HTTP request templates, freeze them into immutable versions, and execute versions asynchronously against third-party APIs with full provenance of inputs, config, and results.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designcollaborationversioning - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Team SQL Workbench with Snapshots and Async Runs
Design a multi-user SQL workbench where analysts co-edit drafts, freeze immutable snapshots, and launch long-running warehouse queries whose results stay traceable to their exact inputs. Tests concurrency control, immutability boundaries, and reliable async execution.
System DesignOnsitecollaborationversioningasync-jobs - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Telemetry Pipeline That Handles Inconsistent Metric Names from Old Clients
Design a telemetry pipeline that ingests metrics from a large fleet of deployed clients, then handle legacy clients that cannot be updated and report the same metric under inconsistent names. It tests durable ingestion, stream processing and storage design, canonical metric catalogs, version-scoped name mapping and schema evolution.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Translation API That Batches Requests on a Fixed Clock
Design a hosted translation API where a GPU worker runs one batch of pending requests every fixed round, and the candidate must derive throughput, batch-closing policy, and failure handling from that one constraint.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designbatchingcapacity-planning - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign a prompt playground
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in large-scale system design, real-time streaming and prompt execution, multi-tenant data modeling, versioning and collaboration workflows, security and privacy controls, observability and cost tracking, and abuse prevention.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardMachine Learning EngineerDesign a scalable service and model performance
This question evaluates a candidate's ability in large-scale distributed system design, performance modeling, capacity planning, and operational reliability for latency-sensitive, multi-region key-value services.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign an LLM Prompt Playground: Schema, Large Prompts, Sharing and Tiny Edits
A system design interview to build an LLM prompt playground where users write, run, save and share prompts, starting from the database schema. Follow-ups probe storing very large prompts, designing sharing, and handling frequent one- or two-character edits to a large prompt without wasting storage.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign an LLM Request Batcher When Every Batch Costs a Fixed Time
Design the serving path for a code-completion model whose accelerators run requests in batches. The interviewer says one batch always takes a fixed 250 ms. Tests batching policy, capacity math, latency budgets, routing results back to callers, failure handling, and questioning the fixed-latency assumption.
System DesignOnsitellm-servingbatchingqueueing - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign distributed median and mode
This question evaluates skills in distributed systems and large-scale analytics, covering data partitioning, streaming and sliding-window processing, quantile and heavy-hitter summarization, fault tolerance, and trade-off analysis for time, space, and network I/O.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign guardrails and fallback for LLM reliability
Design an end-to-end safety and reliability middleware layer for a production LLM service, focusing on low-latency input/output guardrails, early streaming interception, multi-tier fallback strategies, and observability.
System DesignOnsiteLLMSafetyStreaming Architecture - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDistribute 500 GB of Model Weights to 1,000 GPU Workers: Lower Bound and Design
Copy 500 GB of model weights to 100 to 1,000 GPU workers whose 10 Gbps links are shared between upload and download. Derive the lower bound on distribution time, evolve a naive fan-out into a chunked peer-to-peer design, and handle stragglers, failures and cutover. It tests bandwidth reasoning and large-scale distribution design.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerFind a Distributed Mode Efficiently
Design an exact distributed mode-finding algorithm across partitioned workers that minimizes network I/O, prevents hotspotting, handles deterministic tie-breaking, and contrasts with approximate streaming sketches.
System DesignOnsitedistributed-systemssystem-designalgorithms - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerGuide and override compiler optimizations
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in low-level performance engineering and compiler optimization techniques—covering pragmas, intrinsics, manual code transformations, profiling and correctness verification—within the System Design and compiler-aware optimization domain.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerHow to stream a large file to 1000 hosts fastest
Design a high-throughput distribution system to broadcast a large file (e.g., 100 GB model checkpoint) to 1,000 cluster hosts in minimum time, analyzing network bottlenecks and replication topologies.
System DesignOnsitedistributed-systemssystem-designnetworking - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerOptimize a compute kernel with a simulator
This question evaluates performance engineering and low-level kernel optimization competencies, including profiling, data-layout and instruction-level techniques, correctness verification, and benchmark-driven measurement within the System Design domain.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerReview a Batched GPU Inference API Design Doc: Flaws, Throughput, Mixed-Model GPUs
Review a design document for a batched GPU inference API and find its flaws in load balancing, batching, caching, retries and admission control. Then compare theoretical and achievable throughput at 100 ms per batch and 10,000 QPS, and schedule a large and a small model on one 8-GPU pool.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerSchedule instructions on a VLIW pipeline
This question evaluates proficiency in VLIW instruction scheduling, pipeline hazard analysis (RAW/WAR/WAW), register-pressure management, and software-pipelining for loop kernels within the System Design domain of computer architecture and compiler backends.
System DesignOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerSystem Design: Pushing a Multi-Terabyte Snapshot to Thousands of Nodes
Figure out the theoretical floor on how fast a large search-index snapshot can reach every node in a fleet given each machine's shared upload/download bandwidth, then design a chunked, peer-assisted distribution scheme that approaches that floor and copes with stragglers and failures. Tests bandwidth reasoning and evolving a design from a naive baseline.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designnetworkingdistributed-systems - AnyscaleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Service That Sends a JSON Payload to a URL at a Scheduled Time
Design a service that accepts JSON requests containing a target URL, a UTC timestamp and a payload, stores them durably, and sends each payload to its URL at the scheduled time. It tests finding due work at scale, delivery guarantees and retries, isolation from slow endpoints, outbound-request security and failure recovery.
System DesignOnsite - AppleMediumMachine Learning EngineerDesign CI/CD for AI Services
This question evaluates the ability to design a scalable CI/CD and MLOps platform that integrates backend services, model-serving APIs, data and feature pipelines, Kubernetes-based deployments, artifact and model versioning, security, and observability.
System DesignOnsite - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Cloud Photo Storage and Multi-Device Sync
Design a scalable cloud photo storage and multi-device synchronization system supporting resilient media uploads, conflict-free sync, and bandwidth-efficient thumbnail and preview generation.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designcloud-storagedata-synchronization - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Cross-Device Wallpaper Synchronization
This question tests the ability to design a distributed synchronization system that balances low-latency local updates with eventually consistent cross-device state, focusing on conflict resolution, bandwidth optimization, and offline-first availability.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsSynchronizationOffline-first - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Centralized Logging System
Tests the candidate's ability to design a high-throughput, distributed log collection and search platform, balancing ingestion backpressure, index cost, query latency, and tiered storage.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsLoggingStreaming - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Token-Bucket Rate Limiter
This problem tests the ability to design a scalable, low-latency distributed rate-limiting service using the token bucket algorithm while balancing consistency and performance.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsRate LimitingCaching - AppleMediumAccessories Software QA EngineerDesign a Score for Imperfect Palindromes
Design an interpretable palindrome-resemblance score with explicit character handling, similarity features, weights, edge cases, and computational trade-offs.
System DesignOnsite - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Service for the Top K Most-Visited URLs over a Sliding Time Window
A system design question on reporting the top K most-visited URLs over a sliding time window. It tests requirement clarification, stream ingestion and windowed counting, merging per-partition top-K results correctly, serving precomputed rankings, and handling hot keys, late events and exact versus approximate counts.
System DesignOnsite - AppleHardSoftware EngineerDesign a smartwatch sensor subsystem
This question tests your ability to design a resource-constrained embedded sensing subsystem, focusing on the trade-offs between energy efficiency, data latency, and algorithmic reliability in a wearable device.
System DesignOnsiteEmbedded SystemsPower OptimizationSensor Fusion - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerDesign ad click aggregator and file sync service
This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput event processing system for ad clicks and a scalable file synchronization service, focusing on data consistency, idempotency, and distributed storage patterns.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsData IngestionConsistency - AppleHardSoftware EngineerDesign and scale a Yelp-like platform
This question evaluates system design and engineering skills including data modeling, indexing, geospatial and full-text search, caching, replication and sharding for a high-scale reviews platform, together with key generation, storage layout, redirects, rate limiting and analytics for a URL-shortening service, probing the ability to balance scalability, consistency, availability, and operational complexity. It falls under the System Design / Distributed Systems / Databases domain and is commonly asked to assess architectural reasoning and trade-off analysis, testing both conceptual high-level design and practical implementation considerations such as performance, fault tolerance, and operational constraints.
System DesignOnsite
Anthropic
Apple