Back to AI Agents / RAG
About this interview
A technical interview on Safety and Security, 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
Describe the system-message framework for building safe, role-constrained agents and why the system prompt is the primary safety control surface
Identify security threats specific to agentic systems: prompt injection, tool misuse, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration
Explain cryptographic audit trails — signed receipts, hash-chained logs — and what they prove about agent actions for compliance purposes
Articulate a human-in-the-loop escalation policy: when agents must pause and why automatic approval boundaries must be set conservatively
Topics covered
Safety vs. Security FundamentalsSystem Message FrameworkThreat: Prompt InjectionThreat: Tool MisuseThreat: Knowledge Base PoisoningAccess Control & Least PrivilegeHuman-in-the-LoopThreat: Cascading ErrorsCryptographic Audit TrailsSandboxing & IsolationThreat: Privilege EscalationThreat: Data ExfiltrationDefense in DepthInput Validation
A few sample questions
Just examples to set expectations - the real interview has many more and adapts to your responses.
“What does it mean for an AI agent to be 'safe'? How does safety differ from security when we talk about agentic systems?
“A receipt includes a 'policy_id' field referencing the policy that was supposed to govern the agent's action. Does a valid signature on that receipt prove the policy was actually evaluated? Why or why not?
“Explain the difference between what receipts prove versus what policy enforcement proves. If you have both signed receipts and a policy engine, what gap remains that neither fills?