Prepare like a staff engineer.
The content is the same at every level — what changes is the shape of the answer. Learn the delivery, practise the questions volume by volume, keep a bank of stories, and drill the coding round.
How a staff engineer sounds
The four-beat answer, say-this-not-this pairs and the scope signals interviewers listen for.
02STAR story bank
26 worked behavioural stories tagged by the signal each one proves.
03Lines to have ready
Openers, closers and what to say when you don't know.
04Coding round
130 Python problems with tested solutions, complexity and a staff follow-up.
Question banks
140 system questions across four volumes
How LLMs work
Tokens, transformers, prompting and why models make things up.
10 questionsVol ITraining, tuning & inference
Pretraining, fine-tuning, RLHF, and the economics of serving a model.
10 questionsVol IIRAG Fundamentals
Why RAG exists, when not to build it, and what happens inside a query.
10 questionsVol IIChunking & Embeddings
The least glamorous section and the one that decides your ceiling.
10 questionsVol IIRetrieval & Ranking
Dense vs sparse, hybrid, rerankers, top-k and the vocabulary interviewers check for.
10 questionsVol IIProduction RAG Systems
Multi-tenancy, security, caching, monitoring and incidents — judgment under constraint.
10 questionsVol IIIAgent fundamentals
What makes something an agent, tool use, the agent loop, and when a workflow is better.
10 questionsVol IIIAgents in production
Reliability, cost, evaluation, security and human oversight for agents that run for real.
10 questionsVol IVEvaluation
Golden sets, rubrics, LLM-as-judge, human review and the statistics behind a real improvement.
10 questionsVol IVLLMOps
Gateways, versioning, cost, rollouts, red teaming and model upgrades.
10 questionsVol VAI system design
Design ChatGPT-style serving, an eval platform, a coding agent, enterprise search — with numbers.
10 questionsVol VML infrastructure & serving
Parallelism, GPU scheduling, multi-LoRA serving, autoscaling and prefix-aware routing.
10 questionsVol VEstimation & debugging drills
Back-of-envelope maths and production debugging scenarios, timed like the real round.
10 questionsVol VBehavioural & leadership
Conflict, influence, killing a project, owning a failure — answered at Mid, Senior and Staff.
10 questions