Technical practice
How would you turn a research model into a production AI service?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Explain how you would validate model behavior, package its dependencies and define an inference interface. Discuss how you would work with data scientists to preserve accuracy while making a TensorFlow, PyTorch or Scikit-learn model deployable.
How would you balance inference speed, accuracy and cost?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Describe the measurements you would gather before changing a production model or its serving configuration. Explain how you would evaluate improvements against accuracy, latency and operating cost rather than optimizing one measure alone.
How would you containerize and scale a model deployment?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Discuss how Docker packaging and Kubernetes deployment affect reproducibility, resource use and scaling. Explain how you would investigate a deployment that works locally but performs poorly when containerized.
How would you design an AI API or plugin integration?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Compare RESTful APIs and gRPC for an appropriate inference interface, including security, performance and documentation. Discuss how you would assess changes to an existing API or plugin architecture without disrupting its consumers.
When would you deploy inference at the edge rather than in the cloud?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Compare latency, device constraints, connectivity and operational cost. Explain how you would test model compatibility and accuracy when considering TensorRT, ONNX or TFLite for edge deployment.
How would you deploy an AI application on cloud infrastructure?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Explain what you would provision with Terraform and how you would assess a managed AI service such as SageMaker, Vertex AI or Azure ML. Address the trade-offs between managed deployment and greater control over the serving infrastructure.
How would you design real-time and batch AI pipelines?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Contrast throughput, latency and failure handling for the two processing modes. Explain when parallel or distributed processing with Spark or Dask would be useful, and how you would check that it improves the pipeline.
What would you include in CI/CD for a machine-learning workflow?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Outline checks for code, model artifacts and deployment changes across local and cloud environments. Explain how you would make releases reproducible and detect a model or API regression before it reaches production.
How would you diagnose an AI API missing its latency or availability SLA?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Walk through the monitoring, logs and error signals you would examine to separate model-serving issues from API or infrastructure issues. Describe how you would restore service and verify that model performance and availability remain acceptable.
How would you choose storage for an AI application's data?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Compare SQL, NoSQL and vector databases by the data and query patterns they support. Explain how you would evaluate retrieval performance, data consistency and operational complexity for a proposed use case.
Behavioural practice
Tell me about a time you worked with a data scientist to deploy a research model.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Use a real situation, your actions and the result to show how you resolved differences between research assumptions and production needs. Make your own contribution and the deployment outcome clear.
Describe a deployment you coordinated across engineering teams.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Choose a real situation involving coordination with software, DevOps or cloud engineers. Explain your actions to align responsibilities and communicate risks, then state the result.
Tell me about a production performance or availability problem you handled under pressure.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Set out the situation, the evidence you used and the actions you took to diagnose and address it. Describe the result, including what you learned about monitoring or error handling.
Describe a time you learned a new technology and applied it to your work.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Give a real example that explains why the technology was needed in a fast-moving project. Cover how you evaluated it, what you did and the result, without overstating its impact.
Tell me about a time you proposed an improvement to an existing API or integration.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Describe the situation, how you identified the opportunity and how you communicated its trade-offs to others. Explain what action was taken and the result, including any limits to what was achieved.