Agentic AI Interview – Experienced Hire

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

Q1: Multi Agent vs Single Agent

Interview Question

• When would you choose a single agent instead of a multi agent system?

What the Interviewer Is Testing

• Context driven architecture decisions

• Trade-off thinking

• Production cost and latency awareness

Strong Answer Signals

• Clarifies constraints before answering

• Mentions latency and orchestration cost

• Explains failure domain isolation

• Gives scenario-based justification

Weak Answer Signals

• Multi agent is always better

• Single agent is simpler so start there

• No cost or latency discussion

Follow Up Questions

• How would you observe failures here?

• What changes at 10x traffic?

• How would you debug this in prod?

Q2: Planner vs Executor Roles

Interview Question

• Why separate planner and executor agents?

What the Interviewer Is Testing

• Failure isolation understanding

• Control and observability mindset

Strong Answer Signals

• Planner owns state and decisions

• Executors are constrained and replaceable

• Mentions retry and substitution logic

Weak Answer Signals

• Just a design pattern

• Cleaner code explanation only

Follow Up Questions

• What happens if the planner crashes?

• How do you replay execution?