ai engineering

The opener in half of all Applied AI screens, and most candidates answer it with a definition nobody scores. The distinction that actually earns points is about where you start and what your bottleneck turns out to be.

The classic closer, and most candidates answer it with a horoscope or a list of tool names. The signal is whether you hold an actual view, can justify it from what is already happening, and know what it means for the job.

The ordering is the answer, and one move separates the people who have shipped from the people who have prototyped: where evaluation sits in the sequence. Most candidates put it in the wrong place and lose the question in the first sentence.