What protocols govern how agents hand off work, and what makes multi-agent coordination break?
Multi-agent systems coordinate through handoffs and shared state. The signal is knowing the orchestration topologies, what a clean handoff protocol carries, and why naive multi-agent often loses to a single good agent.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Multi-agent systems coordinate through handoffs and shared state. The signal is knowing the orchestration topologies, what a clean handoff protocol carries, and why naive multi-agent often loses to a single good agent.
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.
