The 60-second answer
Define answerability, source-of-truth scope, freshness, permissions, latency, and what the bot must do when evidence is insufficient. Build ingestion/chunking plus hybrid retrieval, optional reranking, grounded prompt construction, generation, and citation/abstention logic.
Build the answer in this order
Define answerability, source-of-truth scope, freshness, permissions, latency, and what the bot must do when evidence is insufficient.
Build ingestion/chunking plus hybrid retrieval, optional reranking, grounded prompt construction, generation, and citation/abstention logic.
Evaluate retrieval recall separately from answer correctness, faithfulness, citation accuracy, latency, and task completion.
Monitor stale documents, permission leaks, hallucination/abstention rates, prompt injection, and user feedback with a reviewed evaluation set.
A useful interview mental model
This is the shape of a strong answer—not a script to memorize.
Senior-level signal
- Senior answers isolate retrieval, generation, and policy failures so each can be debugged independently.
- Include ACL-aware retrieval, versioned corpora, safe fallback, and cost/latency routing between model tiers.
What the interviewer is really testing
Likely follow-up questions
Common weak-answer patterns
- Jumping to a model before defining the product contract.
- Listing components without bottlenecks, metrics, or failure handling.
- Ignoring data quality, serving latency, monitoring, and iteration.