Prepare to explain, debug and design

Practice the work you are likely to do in the role. Ask the recruiter what the interview covers. Some teams emphasize coding and algorithms; others focus on systems, customer scenarios or project review. The exercises below are my preparation rubric, not a description of every employer’s process.

Four practice sessions

1. 45-minute coding: parse a file, deduplicate records, call a fake API, handle an error, and test the result. Explain complexity and edge cases.
2. 45-minute debugging: diagnose why a retrieved answer cites the wrong document. Separate ingestion, retrieval, prompting and generation failures.
3. 45-minute design: design a document assistant for 100 internal users. Clarify data access, freshness, success criteria, budget, failure modes and rollout.
4. 30-minute project defense: give your demo, explain your baseline, show a failure and describe what you would change with another week.

Questions you should answer in plain language

• Why did you use retrieval instead of a larger prompt or fine-tuning? What experiment would change your mind?
• How do you know your evaluation set resembles real use? What did you hold out?
• How would you prevent one user from retrieving another user’s documents?
• What happens if the provider times out, the model changes or a document contains malicious instructions?
• What does one successful task cost? Where is most latency spent?
• What did AI assistance write, and which decisions, tests and reviews did you personally own?

Readiness rubric

Score each area 0 = cannot do it yet, 1 = can do it with help, 2 = can do it and explain it: coding/debugging, API/data flow, LLM concepts, evaluation, deployment, and communication. Aim for no zeros before a technical interview. This is a study aid, not a predictor of an offer.

Keep ordinary software interview practice in your schedule, especially for backend and full-stack openings. Respect each employer’s rules about AI tools during applications and interviews. Practice both with tools and without them so you can show your own understanding.