Compare chunking strategies (fixed-size, recursive, semantic, parent-child). How do you pick?
Chunking quietly caps RAG quality, and 'split every 500 tokens' leaves recall on the table. The signal is knowing the strategy families and the parent-child trick that separates retrieval size from context size.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Chunking quietly caps RAG quality, and 'split every 500 tokens' leaves recall on the table. The signal is knowing the strategy families and the parent-child trick that separates retrieval size from context size.
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.