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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
- Topics
- 8
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Showing 451–480 of 3640 results
- AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerFind the Slowest Function from Profiler Events
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerFix a Buggy LRU Cache, Then Make It Durable with a Write-Ahead Log
Debug a flawed least-recently-used cache by finding each bug with a reproducing call sequence and fixing it, then make the cache durable across crashes with a write-ahead log and snapshots. It tests careful code reading, constant-time LRU design, crash-consistent persistence and recovery.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerFunction-Call LRU Cache: Argument Key Generation and Crash Recovery from a Log
A Python exercise that builds an LRU cache for memoizing function calls. Part one asks how to generate a reliable cache key from a function and its arguments; part two adds crash recovery through an append-only log file, testing record framing, durability, torn writes and replay of the cache state.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - 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 EngineerHiring-Manager Behavioral Round: Impact, Conflict, Cross-Functional Work, and Influencing Without Authority
Tests a candidate's ability to drive technical initiatives across teams, navigate cross-functional disagreements, and exert leadership without formal management authority.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsiteBehavioralLeadershipCross-Functional - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerHow do you design an A/B experiment?
This problem tests your ability to design a rigorous A/B experiment for a consumer-facing AI product, focusing on identifying interference, selecting appropriate metrics, and addressing statistical validity.
Analytics & ExperimentationOnsiteA/B TestingExperiment DesignMetrics - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerHow do you lead under risk and uncertainty?
This question evaluates leadership competencies—risk assessment, stakeholder management, conflict resolution, and decision-making under uncertainty in engineering contexts.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerHow do you review a design document?
This question assesses a candidate's ability to critically evaluate technical design documentation by identifying architectural risks, scalability bottlenecks, and gaps in operational planning.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteSystem DesignCode ReviewReliability - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerHow to Handle the First-Round Interview at an AI Safety Lab
A structured prompt for the earliest conversation in the loop at a lab whose mission is AI safety, where most of the time goes to why you want to work there specifically and how you think about the risks of the technology, not resume review. Tests depth, specificity, and whether your safety views connect to real experience.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsitebehavioralmotivationai-safety - 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 EngineerImplement Parallel Image Processing
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerImplement Persistent Memoization LRU Cache
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsitePythonLRU CacheDecorator - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement Python LRU cache with args and persistence
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - 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 - AnthropicMediumMachine Learning EngineerImplement a web crawler using a provided API
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteConcurrencyGraph TraversalBFS - AnthropicMediumMachine Learning EngineerImplement an extensible prefix tree
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.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - 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
Anthropic