← Anthropic Interview Insights
Start by restating the design's goals and constraints to ground your critique, then systematically evaluate the design across key dimensions like scalability, reliability, security, and cost. Prioritize the most critical flaws and suggest concrete improvements, showing you can balance trade-offs and think like a senior engineer.
Pro tip: Frame your critique constructively: acknowledge what the design does well before diving into flaws, and always propose alternatives or mitigations. This shows you're a collaborative problem-solver, not just a critic.
Restate the intended use case, expected load, latency requirements, and any constraints (e.g., budget, compliance) to ensure your critique is relevant.
Analyze how the design handles increasing load, including throughput, latency, and resource utilization. Look for bottlenecks like single points of failure or inefficient batching.
Check for error handling, retries, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation. Consider dependencies and how failures propagate.
Identify potential vulnerabilities such as authentication, authorization, data encryption, and rate limiting. Ensure alignment with privacy regulations.
Examine monitoring, logging, deployment, and cost implications. Look for missing observability or cost overruns.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.