Interview Prep

Technical topics, coding challenges, behavioral questions and system design — everything to land your AI role.

Machine Learning Fundamentals

Supervised Learning
RegressionClassificationOverfittingRegularization
  • Explain bias-variance tradeoff
  • What is regularization and why is it important?
  • Difference between L1 and L2 regularization
  • How do you handle imbalanced datasets?
Model Evaluation
Cross-validationMetricsROC-AUCPrecision-Recall
  • When to use precision vs recall?
  • Explain cross-validation and its types
  • How to evaluate regression models?
  • What is the difference between accuracy and F1-score?
Feature Engineering
ScalingEncodingFeature SelectionDimensionality Reduction
  • How do you handle categorical variables?
  • When to normalize vs standardize?
  • Explain PCA and when to use it
  • How do you detect and handle outliers?

Deep Learning

Neural Networks Basics
BackpropagationActivation FunctionsOptimizersLoss Functions
  • Explain backpropagation
  • Why use ReLU over sigmoid?
  • What is vanishing gradient problem?
  • Compare SGD, Adam, and RMSprop
CNNs
ConvolutionPoolingResNetTransfer Learning
  • How does convolution work?
  • Explain pooling and its types
  • What are skip connections?
  • When to use transfer learning?
Transformers & LLMs
AttentionSelf-AttentionBERTGPT
  • Explain self-attention mechanism
  • What are positional encodings?
  • Difference between BERT and GPT
  • How does multi-head attention work?

LLM Applications

Prompt Engineering
Few-shot learningChain-of-thoughtSystem prompts
  • Best practices for prompt engineering
  • How to reduce hallucinations?
  • Explain few-shot prompting
  • When to use chain-of-thought?
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
Vector searchEmbeddingsChunkingReranking
  • How does RAG work?
  • Explain vector embeddings
  • What is semantic search?
  • How to improve RAG accuracy?
Fine-tuning
LoRAPEFTRLHFInstruction tuning
  • When to fine-tune vs prompt engineer?
  • Explain LoRA
  • What is RLHF?
  • How to prepare fine-tuning data?

MLOps & Production

Model Deployment
APIsContainerizationServingMonitoring
  • How to deploy ML models?
  • What is model serving?
  • Explain A/B testing for models
  • How to monitor model performance?
Scalability
Distributed trainingInference optimizationCaching
  • How to scale ML systems?
  • Explain data parallelism vs model parallelism
  • How to optimize inference speed?
  • What is model quantization?