5 REAL AGENTIC AI INTERVIEW QUESTIONS (Experienced Hire Level)
Agentic AI Interview – Experienced Hire - Part 2
INTERVIEW CONTEXT
Target Roles
Backend Engineers
ML Engineers
Platform Engineers
AI Engineers (3+ years)
Interview Focus
System design thinking
Production experience
Failure handling and trade-offs
Q3: Memory Design Decisions
Interview Question
- How do you design memory for an agentic system?
What the Interviewer Is Testing
System design thinking
Privacy and compliance awareness
Failure mode handling
Strong Answer Signals
Separates short term and long term memory
Explains when NOT to store memory
Mentions audit and replay needs
Weak Answer Signals
Just naming a vector database
No privacy or retention discussion
Follow Up Questions
What if the memory store is down?
How do you handle sensitive data?
Q4: Failure Handling and Retries
Interview Question
- An external API call fails. What happens next?
What the Interviewer Is Testing
Production readiness
Idempotency awareness
Operational experience
Strong Answer Signals
Partial failure handling
Safe retries via idempotency
Timeouts and backoff strategy
Observability and tracing
Weak Answer Signals
Retry three times with try catch
No observability discussion
Follow Up Questions
How do you prevent cascading failures?
How would you debug this at 3 AM?
Q5: Evaluation and Human in the Loop
Interview Question
- How do you know your agent is working correctly?
What the Interviewer Is Testing
Evaluation as a continuous process
Risk based automation decisions
Strong Answer Signals
Automated evaluation plus human approval gates
Mentions regression and monitoring
Explains which actions require humans
Weak Answer Signals
Test with a few examples
Human reviews everything
Follow Up Questions
How do you detect drift?
How do you measure quality over time?