Lesson deck
RAG interview drills and mock flashcards
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- Front
- Five things to volunteer in a GenAI system design answer?
- Back
- Permission-filtered retrieval, an abstain path, a cost and latency budget, an evaluation and observability plan, and guardrails against injected content.
- Front
- What do you do in the first five minutes of a GenAI design answer?
- Back
- Clarify users, scale, latency target, accuracy bar, cost ceiling and permissions; state assumptions and name what is out of scope.
- Front
- Quick pattern for a token-cost estimate?
- Back
- (Input tokens × input price + output tokens × output price) × requests per day; then name the lever that cuts it most and its quality cost.
- Front
- How do you evaluate a design before launch?
- Back
- A golden set with unanswerable cases, retrieval and generation metrics scored separately, a red-team for injection and leaks, a load test of p95, and shadow traffic.
- Front
- What breaks first at 10 times scale?
- Back
- It depends on what grows. More chunks hit index memory; more queries hit LLM rate limits and cost; more updates hit ingestion throughput. Recompute the changed number first.
- Front
- What is the senior-level differentiator in a design round?
- Back
- Raising failure modes, limits and trade-offs without being asked, and tying choices to numbers or metrics.
- Front
- How do you respond when the interviewer changes a constraint?
- Back
- Restate it, name the earlier number it changes, recompute that number, then say which component changes and what the change costs.