Zero to AI engineer · Stop 14 of 14 lessons

What AI engineering interviews actually ask

What this lesson covers

AI engineering interviews are still standardising in 2026, but the same five question shapes come up in every loop. Once you can name them, they stop being surprises.

The outline

1. The system design. “Design a chatbot over our docs / an agent that files bug reports / a semantic search over internal wikis.” What the panel is actually listening for.
2. The eval question. “How would you measure whether this feature is working?” The single most underrated question — and the most discriminating.
3. The failure-mode question. “What breaks first when this scales / the model changes / traffic spikes?” How to answer without guessing.
4. The cost question. “How much would this cost to run for a thousand users?” The arithmetic you should be able to do live.
5. The prompt-injection / safety question. How to give the answer that shows you understand the actual threat model.
6. The behavioural round, LLM-flavoured. “Tell me about a time an AI system failed and you had to debug it.” Story shape.

Coming soon

In outline.