← Anthropic Interview Insights
This is a build-on-top problem, so if your Level 1 was messy you'll feel it immediately.
Start by clarifying the existing Level 1 API and the new requirements, then design the API endpoints and data models for direct messaging, channel membership, and message history. Focus on consistency, scalability, and security, and discuss trade-offs in your design choices.
Pro tip: Demonstrate awareness of real-world constraints like rate limiting, pagination, and idempotency, and tie your design to Anthropic's focus on safety and reliability.
Ask questions to understand the existing Level 1 API, expected scale, and specific needs for direct messaging, membership, and history. Confirm non-functional requirements like latency, consistency, and security.
Define schemas for users, channels, messages, and memberships, considering relationships and indexing for efficient queries. Discuss trade-offs between normalization and denormalization for read/write performance.
Outline RESTful endpoints for sending direct messages, managing channel members (add/remove/list), and retrieving message history with pagination. Specify request/response formats and status codes.
Discuss strategies for handling high throughput, such as sharding, caching, and asynchronous processing. Include error handling, retries, and idempotency for critical operations.
Explain authentication, authorization, and data privacy measures, such as access controls for direct messages and channel membership. Mention encryption and audit logging.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.