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🤖Skill assessment · 221 questions

AI Engineering skill assessment

Build with LLMs — RAG, agents, evals, and AI systems.

What it covers

LLM Fundamentals & Prompting

Every other skill in this track assumes fluency here: how models tokenize input, why a bigger context window isn't free, and why prompt structure changes output reliability more than model choice does.

Tokenization, context windows, and context rotSystem, user, and multi-turn message structureFew-shot examples and chain-of-thought reasoningSampling controls (temperature, top-p) and determinism tradeoffsStructured outputs and schema-constrained generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

RAG is how production LLM apps stay accurate and current without retraining — know how to fetch the right passages, ground answers in them, and prove the grounding actually held.

Embeddings and vector search fundamentalsChunking strategy and document preprocessingHybrid search and rerankingCitations and source attributionEvaluating retrieval quality (recall, precision, groundedness)

Agents & Tool Use

Tool-calling loops turn an LLM from a text generator into something that can act — this single-agent mechanic underlies nearly every agent you'll build, debug, or get asked about in an interview.

Defining tools and schemas Claude/GPT can call reliablyThe tool-use loop: call, execute, return result, repeatReAct-style reasoning interleaved with actingMCP (Model Context Protocol) for standardized tool and data accessParallel tool calls, error handling, and forced tool choice

Multi-Agent Systems

Coordinating several agents adds real cost, latency, and new failure modes, so know the orchestration patterns that pay off — and when one well-scoped agent beats a fleet of them.

Orchestrator/coordinator and supervisor-worker patternsTask delegation, handoffs, and result synthesisIsolated vs. shared context across agentsParallelization vs. specialization vs. escalationWhen multi-agent adds cost without adding quality

Evaluation & Guardrails

Ship AI features on evidence, not vibes — evals catch quality regressions before users do, and guardrails contain the failure modes (injection, jailbreaks, unsafe output) that evals alone can't prevent.

Building golden datasets and eval harnessesLLM-as-judge scoring and its failure modesRegression testing prompts across model versionsGuardrails against prompt injection and jailbreaksHuman-in-the-loop review for high-stakes outputs

AI System Design

Most production AI failures are architecture failures, not model failures — decide when a fixed workflow beats an autonomous agent, and how to manage context and state as a system scales past a single call.

Workflows vs. agents: predefined paths vs. model-directed controlContext engineering for long-running tasksStatelessness, session state, and conversation memoryModel tiering: matching capability to task complexityComposing RAG, tools, and agents into one pipeline

Cost, Latency & Safety

An AI feature that's accurate but too slow or expensive doesn't ship, and one that's fast and cheap but unsafe doesn't survive review — know the levers for all three before you're asked to fix them under pressure.

Prompt caching for cost and latency reductionBatch processing for non-interactive workloadsModel tiering (fast/cheap vs. capable) by taskRate limits, retries, and streaming for responsivenessContent safety policies and data privacy in production

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