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Interview series
Agentic Protocols
AI Agents / RAG

MCP, A2A, and Interoperability Standards

TechnicalHard~30 minDesigned by experts

About this interview

A technical interview on Agentic Protocols, pitched at the hard level. A voice AI interviewer leads the conversation, adapts its questions to your answers, keeps you on topic, and afterward gives you honest, specific feedback on where you were strong and where to improve. Expect roughly 30 minutes.

What you'll be assessed on

Explain the Model Context Protocol (MCP) client-server architecture and its three core primitives: tools, resources, and prompts
Contrast MCP dynamic tool discovery with static API integrations and explain why this matters for maintainability
Describe the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol and how it enables structured collaboration between independently deployed agents
Identify when to use MCP versus direct API calls versus A2A depending on the integration scenario

Topics covered

MCP fundamentalsMCP architectureMCP primitivesMCP tool call lifecycleMCP dynamic discoveryMCP maintainabilityMCP transportMCP securityMCP tool schemasMCP design decisionsMCP client-server relationshipMCP interoperabilityMCP vs direct APIA2A fundamentals

A few sample questions

Just examples to set expectations - the real interview has many more and adapts to your responses.

What problem does the Model Context Protocol exist to solve? What was broken before it?
You have a static FastAPI endpoint that an agent calls directly. What would you gain — and what would you lose — by wrapping that endpoint in an MCP server instead?
In production, an MCP server exposes 50 tools. How might a very large tool list affect LLM performance, and what design strategies would you use to mitigate that?

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