Your vector search returns results with high similarity scores that are simply not relevant. How do you fix it?
A 0.91 cosine score and a useless passage are not a contradiction. The candidates who score here name the encoding mismatch, the topical-but-not-answering chunk, and why an absolute score cutoff was never going to work.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A 0.91 cosine score and a useless passage are not a contradiction. The candidates who score here name the encoding mismatch, the topical-but-not-answering chunk, and why an absolute score cutoff was never going to work.
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.
