Technical practice
How would you design an end-to-end enterprise application spanning frontend, backend, APIs, and a database?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Explain component boundaries, data flow, and how you would keep the application maintainable. Discuss how performance, reliability, and security requirements would shape the design.
How would you design a RESTful API for a scalable microservice?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Cover resource design, validation, error handling, and versioning. Explain when a separate service is justified and how you would manage communication and failures between services.
How would you deploy and operate a cloud-native application using containers and orchestration?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Describe the roles of a cloud platform, Docker, and Kubernetes in packaging, deployment, scaling, and recovery. Address the trade-off between operational complexity and reliability.
How would you combine automated testing, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and DevSecOps?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Walk through checks from code change to deployment, including tests and security controls. Explain how repeatable infrastructure and deployment gates reduce risk without unnecessarily slowing delivery.
How would you build a retrieval-augmented generation application?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Explain document preparation, embeddings, retrieval, prompt construction, and response generation. Discuss how you would check retrieval relevance and handle answers that are not supported by retrieved material.
When would you use an intelligent agent rather than a simpler LLM workflow?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Compare a defined workflow with an agent that selects actions across steps. Discuss orchestration, limits on actions, failure handling, and how you would evaluate whether added autonomy is worthwhile.
How would you evaluate an LLM application before and after deployment?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Describe representative test cases and measures for response quality, reliability, and latency. Include how responsible AI and governance considerations would affect evaluation and release decisions.
Where could generative AI or coding copilots help across the software development lifecycle?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Choose specific activities from requirements analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, or operations. Explain how you would verify AI-generated output and assess whether it improves quality or delivery efficiency.
How would you troubleshoot declining application health using observability and AIOps?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Explain how you would use health signals to narrow down an issue across application components. Discuss how AI-driven alerts or analysis could assist diagnosis while still requiring validation before action.
What testing strategy would you use for an application that integrates an LLM with APIs and a database?
What to coverSuggested preparation: Distinguish deterministic tests for application components from evaluation of variable LLM responses. Explain how integration and end-to-end tests would catch failures at the boundaries.
Behavioural practice
Tell me about a time you aligned architects, product owners, and other stakeholders on a technical solution.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Use situation, action, and result to show how you clarified differing priorities and reached a decision. State the outcome without implying that this employer uses a particular decision process.
Describe a time you had to balance delivery speed with performance, reliability, or security.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Explain the situation and constraints, the trade-off you made, and who was involved. Give the result and how you checked whether the decision met the need.
Tell me about a production issue you helped diagnose and resolve.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Set out the symptoms and impact, the evidence you used, and the actions you took with others. End with the result and any change that helped prevent or detect a recurrence.
Describe a time you introduced automation into a development or delivery workflow.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Explain the starting problem, what you automated, and how you validated its outputs. Describe the result using evidence of quality, efficiency, or reduced manual effort.
Tell me about a time unclear requirements affected an engineering decision.
What to coverSuggested preparation: Describe the ambiguity, how you worked with business or technical stakeholders to resolve it, and the action you took. Explain the resulting decision and what changed for delivery.