Your RAG system gives bad answers. Walk me through how you localize the failure.
Six stages, six isolating experiments, six metrics. The candidates who score do not guess at knobs, they bisect the pipeline, and they instrument the rungs nobody else does: ranking, context assembly, generation.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Six stages, six isolating experiments, six metrics. The candidates who score do not guess at knobs, they bisect the pipeline, and they instrument the rungs nobody else does: ranking, context assembly, generation.
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.
