What are the types of agent memory (short-term, long-term, episodic, semantic), and how do you use each?
Agents need memory beyond the context window, and 'just store the history' is the wrong answer. The signal is telling the memory types apart and mapping each to a storage and retrieval strategy. Here is the answer.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Agents need memory beyond the context window, and 'just store the history' is the wrong answer. The signal is telling the memory types apart and mapping each to a storage and retrieval strategy. Here is the answer.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.