Key takeaways up front
- Four rounds, four different scoring rubrics
- Trade-off reasoning scores higher than correct answers
- Cost and failure handling are the most-missed topics
These questions come from debriefs with ACRY learners who interviewed at product companies, GCCs and AI-first startups over the last two quarters.
1Round 1 — Screening
Testing whether you have shipped anything real.
- Walk me through a project you built end to end
- What broke, and how did you find out?
- How did you measure whether it worked?
- Which parts did you not build, and why?
2Round 2 — Applied build
Usually a live or take-home task with an assistant allowed.
- Given this dataset, design a retrieval strategy
- Reduce this pipeline's cost by half without losing quality
- Add an evaluation harness to this prototype
3Round 3 — System design
They want your reasoning about trade-offs: latency versus quality, fine-tuning versus retrieval, human review versus full automation.
4Round 4 — Stakeholder
How you would explain a failure to a business owner, and how you would decide not to build something.
What to do next
- Prepare one project you can narrate at four levels of depth.
- Always volunteer cost, latency and failure handling.
- Practise saying 'I would not build this' with a reason.
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