Technical practice
How would you design a production RAG pipeline to ensure low-latency, accurate answers for an enterprise web application?
What to coverSuggested practice question based on required skills in RAG, LLMs, and web application architecture. Candidates should explain document chunking, embedding generation, vector database querying, and prompt augmentation, while addressing trade-offs between retrieval accuracy, token context limits, and round-trip response latency.
How do you handle real-time streaming of generative AI responses to a React or Angular frontend?
What to coverSuggested practice question drawing on the frontend and GenAI integration requirements. Candidates should contrast Server-Sent Events (SSE) versus WebSockets, detail client-side state handling and UI rendering during token streaming, and describe recovery mechanisms for network interruptions or API failures.
What architectural strategies do you use to mitigate prompt injection and enforce output validation when integrating LLMs into REST APIs?
What to coverSuggested practice question aligned with responsibilities for secure API design and GenAI integration. Candidates should discuss input sanitization, system prompt guards, model function calling/structured output schemas, and programmatically validating AI payloads before persistence in backend datastores.
How do you structure autonomous AI agents with tool-calling capabilities to prevent infinite loops and manage error states?
What to coverSuggested practice question based on key duties in AI Agents and prompt engineering. Candidates should cover planning frameworks (e.g., ReAct), runtime tool boundaries, execution timeouts, recursion limits, and fallback strategies when an agent tool invocation fails or produces invalid arguments.
When architecting a full stack application, how do you decide data distribution between SQL and NoSQL databases?
What to coverSuggested practice question reflecting the requirement for SQL/NoSQL data modeling. Candidates should detail consistency requirements (ACID vs. eventual consistency), access patterns, schema evolution, and how relational transaction records interact with semi-structured chat histories or metadata caches.
How would you containerize and deploy an AI-enabled microservice on Kubernetes using CI/CD pipelines?
What to coverSuggested practice question based on the Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD qualifications. Candidates should outline multi-stage Docker builds, pod resource configurations (CPU/memory requests and limits), environment secret management for API keys, health checks, and zero-downtime deployment strategies.
How do you handle rate limiting, token throttling, and failover when integrating enterprise LLM platforms like Azure OpenAI?
What to coverSuggested practice question grounded in the requirement for OpenAI / Azure OpenAI platform experience. Candidates should address exponential backoff retries, multi-region API fallback strategies, token usage monitoring, and queuing heavy requests to protect backend stability.
What techniques do you apply to optimize performance and troubleshoot bottlenecks across a full stack system?
What to coverSuggested practice question aligned with responsibilities for code reviews, performance optimization, and production troubleshooting. Candidates should explain profiling across UI rendering, backend API request handling, database indexing, and external third-party AI call latency.
Behavioural practice
Can you describe a situation where you had to collaborate with Solution Architects or AI Engineers on a conflicting technical design?
What to coverSuggested practice question targeting collaboration with cross-functional technical teams. Candidates should articulate the original technical disagreement, the specific trade-offs evaluated, how alignment was reached constructively, and the measurable delivery outcome.
Tell me about a time you diagnosed and resolved a critical production issue in a deployed microservice or cloud environment.
What to coverSuggested practice question reflecting production support and troubleshooting duties. Candidates should walk through their systematic root-cause analysis, immediate containment actions, coordination with stakeholders, and preventive safeguards implemented.
Describe an instance where you conducted a code review that significantly improved the security, scalability, or code quality of a project.
What to coverSuggested practice question based on senior consultant responsibilities in code review and best practices. Candidates should specify the architectural or security vulnerability identified, how they guided the developer, and the resulting impact on codebase maintainability.
Give an example of delivering an AI or software project under ambiguous requirements or tight timelines.
What to coverSuggested practice question assessing consulting delivery and problem-solving skills. Candidates should outline how they scoped priorities, communicated constraints to product owners, balanced rapid prototyping against technical debt, and delivered the core solution.