LLM Foundations: Architecture, Adaptation, and Steering

Company: Google

Role: Software Engineer

Category: Machine Learning

Difficulty: easy

Interview Round: Onsite

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's conceptual understanding of large language model architecture, adaptation, and inference-time control. It probes knowledge of transformer attention mechanics, post-training and fine-tuning approaches, and prompting versus retrieval techniques, commonly used to gauge machine learning engineering fluency without requiring code.