Design Authentication Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: March 26, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a distributed authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Anthropic
March 26, 202627
11
4,980 solved
Design a distributed authentication system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Anthropic asks this during the Onsite to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would you handle backward compatibility?
- What are the security implications of this design?
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Core Design Principles
In designing the authentication infrastructure for Anthropic's microservices, we should adhere to the following core design principles:
- Single Responsibility Principle (SRP): Each microservice...
Architecture
For the authentication infrastructure, I propose a microservices architecture based on the following components:
- Authentication Service: This service handles user login and token issuance. It ...
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