System design

Anthropic System Design Questions

Every system design problem candidates reported at Anthropic between September 2025 and September 2026, most-asked first. Each one links to a full solution. Tick them off as you go.

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15problems
26candidate reports
6asked more than once
18topics
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Companies

Meta26Microsoft24Amazon23OpenAI22Google20TikTok16Salesforce15Anthropic15Uber12LinkedIn11Apple11JPMorgan11Atlassian11Snowflake9Netflix9Oracle9Goldman Sachs8Rippling8Databricks7Walmart7Airbnb7Capital One7NVIDIA6Pinterest6Roblox6Flipkart4Bloomberg4Visa4Adobe4Anduril1

Topics

Design a Resilient Chat System
5 reports · last seen Jul 2026Real-timeMessagingDistributed Systems
Advanced+5▶ Mock
Design Large Model-Weight Distribution to GPU Workers
4 reports · last seen Aug 2026AI / MLDistributed SystemsStorage
Advanced▶ Mock
Design a Dynamically Batched Inference API
2 reports · last seen Jul 2026AI / MLConcurrencyScheduling
Advanced▶ Mock
Design a Prompt Sharing Product
2 reports · last seen Jul 2026AI / MLSecurityDatabases
Intermediate▶ Mock
Design a Concurrent Image Processing Service
2 reports · last seen Jul 2026Data PipelinesSchedulingStorage
Intermediate▶ Mock
Design a prompt playground
2 reports · last seen May 2026AI / MLFrontendStorage
Intermediate▶ Mock
Design Telemetry Ingestion and Reconcile Metric Names
1 report · last seen Aug 2026ObservabilityData PipelinesStorage
Advanced+3▶ Mock
Find a Distributed Mode Efficiently
1 report · last seen Jul 2026AlgorithmsDistributed SystemsData Pipelines
Intermediate▶ Mock
Design a Distributed Rate Limiter
1 report · last seen Jun 2026Rate LimitingDistributed SystemsAPI Design
Intermediate+9▶ Mock
Design Instagram (Feed, Photos, and Friend Recommendations)
1 report · last seen Jun 2026Distributed SystemsMediaSearch
Advanced+2▶ Mock
Scale Duplicate File Detection
1 report · last seen May 2026StorageAlgorithmsDistributed Systems
Intermediate▶ Mock
Review and Improve a Flawed Design Document
1 report · last seen Apr 2026Distributed SystemsSecurityObservability
Intermediate▶ Mock
Design guardrails and fallback for LLM reliability
1 report · last seen Feb 2026AI / MLSecurityDistributed Systems
Intermediate▶ Mock
Design a distributed web crawler
1 report · last seen Jan 2026Distributed SystemsStorageSearch
Advanced+2▶ Mock
Optimize HTTP requests for speed and limits
1 report · last seen Dec 2025ConcurrencyAPI DesignRate Limiting
Intermediate▶ Mock

Duplicate reports of the same problem are merged and counted.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What system design questions does Anthropic ask?

Candidates reported 15 distinct system design problems at Anthropic between September 2025 and September 2026, including Design a Resilient Chat System, Design Large Model-Weight Distribution to GPU Workers, Design a Dynamically Batched Inference API.

How to prepare for Anthropic system design interview?

Start with the Anthropic problems reported most often, work through each full solution, then practice explaining a design end to end under time pressure in a mock interview.

What is the difference between HLD and LLD at Anthropic?

HLD (High-Level Design) focuses on system architecture, scalability, and component interactions. LLD (Low-Level Design) dives into class diagrams, API contracts, and database schemas. Anthropic tests both.