Ace the AI Engineer Interview: LLM Fundamentals

Last Updated on August 24, 2026 by Editorial Team Author(s): Bixing Yan Originally published on Towards AI. Ace the AI Engineer Interview: LLM Fundamentals 0. Prep Principals Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The AI era is evolving furiously. I will do my best to keep this blog updated, but it is impossible to cover every potential interview question for every company. So, I hope this note serves as a source of inspiration rather than a bible to follow mechanically. Prepare as if you were a real engineer. Go through a toy AI project, such as a chatbot, and think deeply about the following: Break down each step and identify the practical problems that may arise. Explore what techniques are commonly used to solve those problems. Think through the trade-offs between different techniques, and how you would make decisions under different scenarios. I believe that, by doing this, YOU CAN eventually build a strong, transferable skill set, shine, and ACE the AI Engineer Interviews. 1. NLP Data Augmentation A common problem in LLM training is data insufficiency. Thus data augmentation is a frequented tested point. The data au…