Mock system design interview at Anthropic
A live 45-minute round on one of the questions reported in Anthropic interviews, run by an AI interviewer that asks one thing at a time, probes what you say, and weighs what that round is reported to weigh. It ends with a debrief: a score, what was strong, what was missing.
Design Slack
Real-time team messaging: channels, DMs, presence, history and search for millions of concurrent users.
You will not see the requirements, the numbers or the diagram before you start — that is the point.
What the Anthropic round is reported to look like
A 50–55 minute round, often on infrastructure behind an AI product rather than a consumer app. Two shapes are reported: design from scratch, and reviewing a design document and improving it.
What it weighs
- Decomposition: breaking an open problem into parts that can be reasoned about separately
- Scale reasoning under real constraints, especially scarce and expensive capacity
- Failure modes, overload behaviour and what degrades first
- Driving the conversation yourself at staff level, rather than waiting to be prompted
The common mistake
Most of the questions reduce to ordinary distributed systems — queueing, batching, backpressure. Candidates who reach for model internals instead of the infrastructure answer tend to drift.
From public interview guides and candidate reports, not from Anthropic. The interviewer is an AI running in that style; it is practice, not a prediction.
Start the round
Other companies: Google · Meta · Amazon · OpenAI · Microsoft · Uber · Stripe · NVIDIA