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Software Engineer 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
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- 11
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Showing 121–150 of 1189 results
- 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 - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a prompt-sharing platform
This question assesses the ability to design a scalable content-sharing platform, focusing on data modeling, efficient retrieval of user-generated prompts, and the handling of concurrent access and permissions.
System DesignTechnical ScreenAPI DesignData ModelingScalability - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable network I/O service
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a scalable, highly available network I/O backend, testing competencies in distributed systems, storage architecture, CDN and caching integration, API and data model design, capacity planning, failure handling, observability, and security.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable, reliable system
The prompt evaluates competence in large-scale distributed system design, covering storage architecture, consistency and replication strategies, caching, APIs and data models, operational reliability, security, and cost/capacity planning.
System DesignTechnical Screen - 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 - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerDesign production-ready dedup service
This question evaluates system design and distributed storage competencies, focusing on scalable file deduplication, content-defined chunking, metadata and index design, multi-tenant architectures, and operational reliability across regions.
System DesignTechnical Screen - 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 - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerHow would you scale batch image pipelines?
This problem evaluates your ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant batch processing system for high-throughput image transformation tasks.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsScalabilityBatch Processing - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerIdentify and mitigate deduplication program risks
This question evaluates understanding of system design and practical engineering competencies required for building resilient file deduplication tools, covering filesystem semantics, error handling, hashing and collision considerations, concurrency, performance bottlenecks, cross-platform interoperability, and safety trade-offs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - 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 EngineerScale crawler with thread pool
This question evaluates system design and concurrent programming competencies, focusing on bounded thread-pool architecture, thread-safe frontier and deduplication structures, per-host politeness and in-flight limits, reliability mechanisms (timeouts, retries, backoff), and graceful shutdown and termination semantics.
System DesignTechnical Screen - 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 - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerCloud Provider Design for Provisioning Resources Through Terraform
A cloud infrastructure design question asking what a cloud provider must build so customers can create, update and destroy its resources with Terraform. It tests mapping the Terraform resource lifecycle to provider APIs, handling long-running operations and their status, idempotent retries, and drift detection.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleEasySoftware EngineerDesign APIs for a Voting System
Define APIs and a core model for an authenticated election with one final ballot per voter and results hidden until close. The design discussion covers eligibility, deterministic timing, idempotent voting, concurrent submissions, recountable records, audit trails, and privacy boundaries.
System DesignTechnical Screen - 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 Disk-Based Inventory Serving
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design disk-based inventory services under tight RAM constraints, focusing on data layout, indexing strategies, caching, write/read paths, conditional updates, concurrency control, and I/O-latency trade-offs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - 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 - 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
Anthropic
Apple