Skip to main content
Back
35 XP

Lesson 1 · 9 min

The 2026 AI engineering interview landscape

What teams actually screen for in 2026. The five interview formats most AI engineering loops use, and what separates a strong candidate from a passable one.

The five formats you'll see

Most 2026 AI engineering loops are some combination of:

  1. Prompt-design exercise. Given a brief, write a working prompt against an eval set. Often live, sometimes a take-home.
  2. Eval-design discussion. "How would you know your prompt was good?" The single most discriminating question in the loop.
  3. System design — RAG or agent. A whiteboard exercise on a realistic product.
  4. Debugging exercise. Broken prompt, broken eval, broken pipeline. Find and fix.
  5. Behavioral / decision-making. Trade-offs between RAG vs fine-tuning vs prompting; cost vs quality.

No loop covers all five. Most cover three. The decisive ones are eval-design and system-design — they reveal whether you've actually shipped, or just read about it.