Behavioral and AI-Safety Interview Prompts (Software Engineer, Onsite)

Context

You are interviewing for a Software Engineer role at an AI-focused organization. Prepare concise, structured responses that demonstrate ownership, judgment under ambiguity, and a practical approach to AI safety and responsible deployment.

Prompts

1. Background
   • Walk through your background: roles, focus areas, and the through-line of your career.
2. Most Impactful Projects
   • 1–2 projects with measurable impact. Your role, decisions, trade-offs, and outcomes.
3. Why This Team
   • Reasons for joining this team. How your goals align with the team’s mission and work.
4. Strengths and Areas for Growth
   • Specific strengths with examples; targeted, actionable growth areas and what you’re doing about them.
5. Collaboration Style
   • How you work with PMs, researchers, and engineers. Communication, conflict resolution, and decision-making.
6. Ownership and Ambiguity
   • Examples showing end-to-end ownership and thriving with ambiguous goals or constraints.
7. AI Safety and Responsible Deployment
   • Your approach to AI safety, risk assessment, and responsible rollout.
8. Guardrails and Abuse-Mitigation
   • What product and system guardrails you would build (input/output filtering, tools, isolation, privacy) and how you’d mitigate abuse at scale.
9. Evaluating and Monitoring Model Risks
   • How you would evaluate and monitor risks such as prompt injection, jailbreaks, and data leakage. Include concrete examples from past work or realistic analogs.