LLM & Generative AI Interview Questions
LLM and generative AI questions are rapidly growing in interview frequency as companies adopt AI-first strategies.
Expect questions on transformer architecture, attention mechanisms, fine-tuning strategies, RAG pipelines, and evaluation of generative models.
Interviewers at AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google evaluate both theoretical depth and practical deployment experience.
Common LLM interview patterns
- Transformer architecture and self-attention mechanism
- Fine-tuning vs prompting vs RAG trade-offs
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline design
- Prompt engineering and chain-of-thought reasoning
- Evaluation metrics for generative models (BLEU, ROUGE, human eval)
- Tokenization strategies and vocabulary design
- Alignment, RLHF, and safety considerations
LLM interview questions
Debug and fix a PyTorch Transformer training loop
Debug transformer and train classifier
Implement 1NN with NumPy
Explain Core ML Interview Concepts
Implement and Debug Backprop in NumPy
Explain Logistic Regression, Backprop, and Adam
Debug a broken Transformer implementation
Filter Bad Human Annotations
Debug a GRPO training loop and explain ratios
Design a Double Descent Experiment
Diagnose Transformer training and inference bugs
Design robber detection from surveillance video
Train a classifier and analyze dataset
Debug a transformer training pipeline
Design sequence decoding with greedy and beam search
Implement and visualize in-place augmentations
Debug a Broken Transformer
Implement and derive backprop from scratch
Evaluate Promotions for Uber Eats Users
Common mistakes in LLM interviews
- Not understanding the difference between fine-tuning and in-context learning
- Ignoring hallucination risks in production deployments
- Overcomplicating solutions when prompt engineering suffices
- Not discussing latency, cost, and token budget trade-offs
- Treating LLMs as deterministic systems
How LLM questions are evaluated
Show practical understanding of when to use fine-tuning vs RAG vs prompting.
Discuss evaluation strategies for open-ended generation tasks.
Demonstrate awareness of safety, alignment, and deployment considerations.
Related ML concepts
LLM & Generative AI Interview FAQs
What is RAG and how does it differ from fine-tuning?
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) retrieves relevant documents at inference time and provides them as context to the LLM. Fine-tuning modifies the model weights on your data. RAG is better for frequently changing knowledge; fine-tuning is better for teaching the model new skills or styles.
What transformer concepts should I know for interviews?
Understand self-attention, multi-head attention, positional encoding, and the encoder-decoder architecture. Know why attention scales better than RNNs for long sequences. Be able to explain how the key-query-value mechanism works intuitively.