Interview craft

Lines to have ready

Keep a handful of these loaded. They buy thinking time and they signal level at the same time.

Openers

Buy thinking time, signal level

"Let me check one assumption first — what's the corpus size and churn rate? That changes the answer materially."

"I'll give you the default I'd start with, then where I'd deviate."

"There's a cheap version and an expensive version. Let me do both and say when I'd pay for the second."

Closers

End every design answer here

"Where this breaks is..." — always end a design answer here.

"The way I'd know if this was working is..." — attach a metric to every claim.

"I've got that wrong before, in this way..." — one of these per interview is worth a great deal.

If you don't know

Finding your edge cleanly is a positive signal

"I haven't operated that at scale. Here's how I'd reason about it, and here's the first experiment I'd run to find out." Never bluff a number. An interviewer at this level is specifically probing for whether you know the edge of your own knowledge — finding it cleanly is a positive signal, not a negative one.

The original 40 RAG questions came from the editor's RAG interview playbook; the handbook has since grown to five volumes. Answers, trade-offs and STAR structures are written for staff-level delivery — rebuild every story from your own projects before you use it.