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Distribute a 10GB file from one bandwidth-limited source to thousands of machines as fast as possible.

Anthropic's signature opener. The naive answer (one server pushes to N clients) is bottlenecked by the source uplink and scales linearly. The answer interviewers reward turns receivers into senders so the swarm's capacity grows with its size. Here is that reasoning.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

Anthropic's signature opener. The naive answer (one server pushes to N clients) is bottlenecked by the source uplink and scales linearly. The answer interviewers reward turns receivers into senders so the swarm's capacity grows with its size. Here is that reasoning.

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Next in this trackDesign a distributed key-value store (partitioning, replication, and consistency).Next in this trackDesign a distributed rate limiter for an API serving millions of requests per second.Next in this trackDesign a load balancer that distributes traffic across a fleet of backend servers.
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