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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
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- 546
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Showing 301–330 of 2336 results
- AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement Python LRU cache with varargs
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement a Banking System
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement a Least-Recently-Used Cache
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerImplement a Longest-Match Tokenizer
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsitetriestringnlp - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerImplement a hierarchical file store
This problem tests your ability to design a hierarchical file system data structure and implement operations for directory traversal, file manipulation, and path normalization.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteTreeTrieData Structures - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerImplement and analyze custom attention
This question evaluates implementation and analysis skills for scaled dot-product attention, testing competencies in efficient tensorized PyTorch coding, numerical stability and mixed-precision handling, masking semantics (causal and padding), multi-head shape correctness, and unit-test validation including gradient and edge-case behavior.
Machine LearningOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement and derive backprop from scratch
This question evaluates understanding and practical implementation of neural network fundamentals, specifically analytic backpropagation and gradient derivation, numerically stable binary cross-entropy computation, parameter initialization, gradient descent updates, and gradient checking.
Machine LearningOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement crawler, dedup, and persistent LRU
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement file deduplication at scale
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerImplement staircase printing and distributed mode/median
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement thread-safe blocking queue
This question evaluates competency in concurrent programming, synchronization primitives, and implementation of thread-safe bounded blocking queues within the Coding & Algorithms domain.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerIn-Memory Key-Value Database with Nested Transactions
Design an in-memory key-value store supporting nested transactions with begin, commit, rollback, get, set, and delete operations.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteData StructuresStackDesign - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerLRU Cache
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteHash MapDoubly Linked ListDesign - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerLead a Project Retrospective Discussion
Lead a project retrospective that explains the hardest challenge, its root cause, and the alternatives considered. Separate personal ownership from team effort, support outcomes with evidence, acknowledge limitations, and show how the lesson changed later decisions.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerMake a Web Crawler Concurrent with Thread-Safe Visited State
Convert a sequential crawler to bounded concurrency using atomic URL reservation, explicit retry state, and completion detection that accounts for active fetches.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerMode, Median and Sort Across 10 Nodes with Send/Receive While Minimizing Traffic
Integers are spread across 10 nodes that communicate only by sending and receiving messages. Write the per-node programs that compute the exact mode, the median and a globally sorted order while sending as little data as possible. It tests MapReduce-style aggregation, distributed selection, sample sort and message coordination.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - 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 EngineerParallelize a Directory Walker With Thread-Safe Visited Tracking
Turn a sequential directory walker into a bounded-concurrency one, using an atomic reserve-before-expand step so two worker threads that reach the same directory at once never process it twice.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteconcurrencythreadingshared-state - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerPath Resolution with Symbolic Links
Implement a filesystem path resolution function that normalizes paths containing '.', '..', and symbolic links while detecting cycles.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsitestring parsingstacksimulation - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerPerformance-Model a Sharded Matrix Multiply: FLOPs, Memory, Network and Roofline
Model the performance of a matrix multiplication by hand: count floating-point operations, memory bytes and network bytes, apply the roofline model to decide what bounds it, and compare sharding along each dimension across several accelerators. It tests arithmetic intensity, collective communication costs and quantitative reasoning.
ML System DesignOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerPresent a Technical Project to a Cross-Functional Audience
Tests your ability to present a complex engineering effort to a cross-functional technical panel, balancing architectural depth, consequential trade-offs, and rigorous post-launch reflection.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsitebehavioralproject-deep-divecommunication - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerPresent project and answer behaviorals
This question evaluates leadership and behavioral competencies alongside technical communication skills, including project ownership, system architecture articulation, trade-off reasoning, metrics-driven impact measurement, stakeholder management, and mentorship.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerReason About Delaying an AI Breakthrough Under Uncertain Risk
Reason about an AI breakthrough under uncertain risk by separating research and deployment, weighing evidence and reversibility, and addressing competitive pressure consistently.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerRepairing a Difficult Working Relationship
Tests emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and constructive conflict resolution when collaborating with engineering peers or cross-functional partners under pressure.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsitebehavioralconflict-resolutioncollaboration - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerResolve a Package Dependency Graph with Concurrent Fetches
Discover a package's transitive dependency graph from a slow, flaky registry, first with a sequential BFS and then with a bounded pool of worker threads. Tests atomic visited-set reservation, explicit retry state, and correct termination detection with in-flight work.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteconcurrencythreadinggraph-traversal - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerRespond to a Hypothetical Loss of Employer Equity Value
Tests how candidates navigate extreme organizational adversity, balance personal financial realities against mission alignment, and evaluate their long-term commitment and team responsibilities during a company crisis.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsiteBehavioralLeadershipAdversity Management - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerResume Project Deep Dive and Prioritizing Too Many Tasks at Once
A behavioral interview question in two parts: a deep dive into a project from your resume, where the interviewer probes design decisions, your own contribution and results, and a question about a time you had more tasks than you could finish. It tests technical depth, prioritization criteria and how you communicate trade-offs to stakeholders.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerReuse Work Across Multiprocess Image Pipelines
Implement a thread-safe pipeline execution engine that caches deterministic intermediate prefix results, deduplicates concurrent in-flight computations, and manages a bounded LRU cache.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteconcurrencycachingsystem-design - 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 EngineerReview an inference API design for scale
This question tests a candidate's ability to critically evaluate ML system designs for production-scale inference APIs, covering multi-tenancy, GPU resource constraints, and streaming token delivery. It assesses architectural reasoning across reliability, latency trade-offs, and capacity planning in the ML Systems domain.
ML System DesignOnsite
Anthropic