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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Technical interview prep for GenAI roles: what's actually being tested

#career #interview #genai

A GenAI engineering interview is rarely pure DSA and rarely pure LLM trivia — it's usually both, plus a system-design round that expects you to reason about a real pipeline, not recite a model's parameter count.

What actually gets asked

  • Classic DSA, at a level appropriate to the role — this doesn't disappear because the role has 'AI' in the title.
  • System design: 'design a RAG system for X' — expect follow-ups on chunking, evaluation and failure modes, not just architecture boxes.
  • Practical judgement: 'the model is hallucinating dates, what do you check first' — tests whether you've actually debugged one of these.

How to prepare for the practical-judgement questions

These aren't found in an interview prep book — they come from having actually built and broken a RAG or fine-tuning pipeline. A single well-documented project you can speak about in depth outperforms a list of tutorials you've followed.

See the GenAI engineer roadmap for 2026 and GenAI engineer interview questions.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour presenting BrandHive on a projector screen
Presenting BrandHive

Pranjul Rathour in a shirt and tie holding a microphone in front of a career-opportunities slide
A career session for students

Pranjul Rathour presenting with a microphone in front of a slide reading 'Now what's the conclusion?'
Presenting to a room

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
Portfolio & blog · LinkedIn · X · Instagram · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

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