AI interview questions

What is Artificial Intelligence? How is it different from traditional software?

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

Explain AI vs Machine Learning vs Deep Learning — with a simple analogy.

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

What is Narrow AI vs General AI (AGI)?

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

What are supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning?

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

What is the difference between training and inference?

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

Explain neural networks in simple terms — no math required.

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

What is a Transformer and why did it change AI?

Medium · AI, Fundamentals

What are tokens in LLMs? Why do they matter for cost and limits?

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

What is an embedding? Give a real-world use case.

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

What is hallucination in AI? Why does it happen?

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

What is AI bias and why should engineers care?

Easy · AI, Fundamentals

When should you NOT use AI in a project?

Medium · AI, Fundamentals

Describe typical AI adoption maturity levels in an organization.

Medium · AI, Fundamentals

Open-source vs closed-source AI models — trade-offs?

Medium · AI, Fundamentals

What does a typical AI application stack look like for a backend engineer?

Medium · AI, Fundamentals

What is a Large Language Model (LLM)? How does it work at a high level?

Easy · AI, LLM Basics

Compare GPT, Claude, and Gemini — what should you know for interviews?

Easy · AI, LLM Basics

What is a context window? How do you manage it in production?

Easy · AI, LLM Basics

What is temperature in LLM APIs? When to use low vs high?

Easy · AI, LLM Basics

What is a system prompt? Why is it critical?

Easy · AI, LLM Basics

What is few-shot prompting? Give an example.

Easy · AI, LLM Basics

Fine-tuning vs prompt engineering — when to use each?

Medium · AI, LLM Basics

What is streaming in LLM responses? Why implement it?

Easy · AI, LLM Basics

What is function calling (tool use) in LLMs?

Medium · AI, LLM Basics

What is multimodal AI? Practical use cases for backend engineers?

Easy · AI, LLM Basics

Explain key LLM API parameters: max_tokens, top_p, stop sequences.

Medium · AI, LLM Basics

What is RLHF? Why do interviewers ask about it?

Medium · AI, LLM Basics

What is model quantization? Why does it matter for deployment?

Medium · AI, LLM Basics

What is prompt injection? Give a simple example.

Medium · AI, LLM Basics

What factors affect LLM API latency? How do you optimize?

Medium · AI, LLM Basics

What is prompt engineering? Is it a real engineering skill?

Easy · AI, Prompt Engineering

What is the CRAFT framework for writing prompts?

Easy · AI, Prompt Engineering

What is Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting?

Easy · AI, Prompt Engineering

How do you get consistent structured output (JSON) from LLMs?

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

What is role-based prompting? When is it effective?

Easy · AI, Prompt Engineering

Why are negative instructions ("don't do X") less effective than positive ones?

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

What is prompt chaining? Give a practical example.

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

What is self-consistency decoding?

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

What is meta-prompting?

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

Where should you place context in a prompt — beginning or end?

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

Why use delimiters (XML tags, triple quotes) in prompts?

Easy · AI, Prompt Engineering

How do you version and manage prompts in a team?

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

How do you evaluate if a prompt is good enough?

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

How do you reduce prompt-related costs?

Medium · AI, Prompt Engineering

What are the most common prompt engineering mistakes?

Easy · AI, Prompt Engineering

What is RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)?

Easy · AI, RAG

RAG vs fine-tuning — when to use which?

Medium · AI, RAG

What is document chunking in RAG? Best practices?

Medium · AI, RAG

What is a vector database? Popular options?

Easy · AI, RAG

How does similarity search work? Cosine vs dot product?

Medium · AI, RAG

What is hybrid search in RAG?

Medium · AI, RAG

What is reranking in a RAG pipeline?

Medium · AI, RAG

Describe a document indexing pipeline for RAG.

Medium · AI, RAG

Describe the query-time RAG pipeline end to end.

Medium · AI, RAG

How do you implement citations in RAG answers?

Medium · AI, RAG

What are common RAG failure modes and fixes?

Medium · AI, RAG

How do you design multi-tenant RAG (each customer sees only their docs)?

Hard · AI, RAG

What is Graph RAG? When is it useful?

Hard · AI, RAG

How do you evaluate RAG system quality?

Medium · AI, RAG

What is parent-child chunking strategy?

Medium · AI, RAG

What is an AI agent? How is it different from a simple chatbot?

Easy · AI, Agents

Explain the ReAct (Reason + Act) pattern for agents.

Medium · AI, Agents

What are tools in the context of AI agents?

Easy · AI, Agents

How do agents plan multi-step tasks?

Medium · AI, Agents

What types of memory do AI agents need?

Medium · AI, Agents

Compare popular agent frameworks: LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI.

Medium · AI, Agents

What is a multi-agent system? When would you use one?

Medium · AI, Agents

What is human-in-the-loop (HITL) for agents?

Medium · AI, Agents

How do you handle errors in agent loops?

Medium · AI, Agents

How do you manage agent state across steps?

Medium · AI, Agents

What guardrails should agent systems have?

Medium · AI, Agents

AI agent vs deterministic workflow (e.g., Step Functions) — when to use each?

Medium · AI, Agents

What is MCP (Model Context Protocol)? Why is it trending?

Medium · AI, Agents

How do you control costs in agent systems?

Medium · AI, Agents

How do you test AI agents?

Hard · AI, Agents

What is a coding agent (like Cursor, Devin)? How does it work?

Medium · AI, Agents

Explain the supervisor agent pattern.

Hard · AI, Agents

What is self-reflection in agents?

Medium · AI, Agents

Describe a production-ready agent architecture.

Hard · AI, Agents

Design an AI agent for customer support that can look up orders and create tickets.

Hard · AI, Agents

How do you use AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor) effectively in daily work?

Easy · AI, Projects

How would you build an AI support chatbot for your product?

Medium · AI, Projects

How would you implement AI-powered document search for an enterprise?

Medium · AI, Projects

How would you build an AI code review assistant for pull requests?

Medium · AI, Projects

How do you integrate an LLM API into a Spring Boot application?

Medium · AI, Projects

What is Spring AI? When would you use it?

Medium · AI, Projects

Why build an AI API gateway in front of LLM providers?

Medium · AI, Projects

How do you measure ROI of an AI feature?

Medium · AI, Projects

How do you drive AI adoption across an engineering team?

Medium · AI, Projects

How do you build a data pipeline for AI features?

Medium · AI, Projects

How do you safely roll out AI features using feature flags?

Easy · AI, Projects

How do you answer "Tell me about an AI project you worked on" in interviews?

Easy · AI, Projects

How do you add AI to a legacy system without rewriting it?

Medium · AI, Projects

Give an example of using AI for notification/email summarization.

Easy · AI, Projects

What AI skills should a senior backend engineer have?

Easy · AI, Projects

What should you monitor in a production AI application?

Medium · AI, Production

What should you log for AI requests? What should you NOT log?

Medium · AI, Production

How do you cache LLM responses in production?

Medium · AI, Production

How do you implement rate limiting for AI endpoints?

Medium · AI, Production

How do you handle LLM provider outages?

Medium · AI, Production

How do you scale an AI application handling 10K requests/day?

Medium · AI, Production

How do you include AI in CI/CD pipelines?

Medium · AI, Production

How do you A/B test prompts or models in production?

Medium · AI, Production

What SLAs are realistic for AI-powered features?

Medium · AI, Production

How do you monitor and control AI costs in production?

Medium · AI, Production

Blue-green vs canary deployment for AI features?

Medium · AI, Production

When should AI processing be synchronous vs asynchronous?

Easy · AI, Production

How do you health-check an AI service?

Easy · AI, Production

How do you handle an AI quality incident (bad responses going to users)?

Hard · AI, Production

What is an LLM gateway and what features should it provide?

Medium · AI, Production

Describe a reference architecture for an enterprise AI platform.

Hard · AI, Architecture

System design: AI-powered customer support platform for 1M users.

Hard · AI, Architecture

System design: Document intelligence platform (upload, analyze, Q&A).

Hard · AI, Architecture

What is model routing? How do you implement it?

Medium · AI, Architecture

How does event-driven architecture work with AI processing?

Medium · AI, Architecture

How do you integrate AI into a microservices architecture?

Medium · AI, Architecture

What is the AI data flywheel?

Medium · AI, Architecture

Build vs buy for AI infrastructure — how do you decide?

Medium · AI, Architecture

What AI architecture questions might a Staff engineer face?

Hard · AI, Architecture

How do you plan disaster recovery for AI-dependent systems?

Hard · AI, Architecture

How do you architect for cost efficiency in AI systems?

Medium · AI, Architecture

What is a semantic layer in AI architecture?

Medium · AI, Architecture

Real-time AI vs batch AI — architectural differences?

Medium · AI, Architecture

What AI questions might an Architect face in interviews?

Hard · AI, Architecture

What AI architecture trends should senior engineers know about?

Medium · AI, Architecture

How do you protect user data when using third-party LLM APIs?

Medium · AI, Security

How do you defend against prompt injection attacks?

Medium · AI, Security

How do you manage LLM API keys securely?

Easy · AI, Security

Why must you validate LLM outputs before using them?

Medium · AI, Security

How do you implement RBAC for AI features?

Medium · AI, Security

How does GDPR affect AI applications?

Medium · AI, Security

What is indirect prompt injection?

Medium · AI, Security

What audit trail is needed for AI systems in regulated industries?

Hard · AI, Security

What is AI red teaming?

Medium · AI, Security

What is the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications?

Medium · AI, Security

What is Responsible AI? Why should engineers care?

Easy · AI, Ethics

How do you make AI features transparent to users?

Easy · AI, Ethics

When is human oversight mandatory for AI decisions?

Medium · AI, Ethics

How do you mitigate bias in AI systems?

Medium · AI, Ethics

What is the environmental impact of AI? Should you discuss it?

Easy · AI, Ethics

How do you answer "Will AI replace software engineers?"

Easy · AI, Ethics

What is the EU AI Act? What should engineers know?

Medium · AI, Ethics

What are IP concerns with AI-generated content and code?

Medium · AI, Ethics

How can AI be misused for misinformation? How do you prevent it in your products?

Medium · AI, Ethics

What is AI governance in an organization?

Medium · AI, Ethics

What makes an AI system trustworthy?

Easy · AI, Ethics

What is overreliance on AI and how do you prevent it?

Easy · AI, Ethics

How do you ensure AI features work for diverse users?

Medium · AI, Ethics

How do you handle an ethical dilemma interview question about AI?

Medium · AI, Ethics

What is your personal philosophy on building AI responsibly?

Easy · AI, Ethics

What is Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search and why do vector DBs use it?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

Compare HNSW and IVF indexing algorithms in vector databases.

Hard · AI, Vector DB

When should you use pgvector vs a dedicated vector database like Pinecone or Qdrant?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

How does metadata filtering work in vector database queries?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

How do embedding dimensions affect vector database performance and quality?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

How do you design collections (indexes) in a vector database?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

How do you handle document updates in a vector database?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

Compare Pinecone, Qdrant, and Weaviate for production RAG.

Medium · AI, Vector DB

How do you tune recall vs latency in a vector database?

Hard · AI, Vector DB

What is the difference between sparse and dense vectors?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

What is vector quantization in vector databases?

Hard · AI, Vector DB

What metrics should you monitor for a vector database in production?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

When would you use Redis for vector search instead of a dedicated vector DB?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

How do you backup and recover a vector database?

Medium · AI, Vector DB

Design a vector database layer for a multi-tenant SaaS with 500K documents per tenant.

Hard · AI, Vector DB