← Anthropic Interview Insights
This one hit differently because you can't just recite a generic distributed systems answer.
Start by clarifying requirements and scale, then propose a layered architecture covering model serving, caching, and safety. Emphasize trade-offs and justify choices based on latency, cost, and safety needs.
Pro tip: Show awareness of Anthropic's safety-first culture by integrating safety validation at multiple stages and discussing how to balance safety with performance.
Ask about expected QPS, latency targets, model size, and safety requirements to tailor the design.
Outline components: API gateway, load balancer, model servers, cache, safety layers, and monitoring.
Discuss model serving options (e.g., GPU clusters, serverless), autoscaling, and model versioning.
Explain multi-level caching (e.g., response cache, embedding cache) and invalidation policies.
Describe input/output filtering, moderation models, and human-in-the-loop for edge cases.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.