Back to LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering
Curated
Interview series
Prompt Engineering Fundamentals
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

Prompt Engineering: Basics & Core Techniques

TechnicalEasy~30 minDesigned by experts

About this interview

A technical interview on Prompt Engineering Fundamentals, pitched at the easy 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 four elements of a well-structured prompt: instruction, context, input data, and output indicator
Contrast zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot prompting and explain when each is appropriate
Describe LLM inference parameters (temperature, top-p, max tokens) and their effect on output
Explain chain-of-thought prompting and why it improves reasoning on multi-step tasks

Topics covered

Prompt engineering definitionPrompt elementsZero-shot promptingFew-shot promptingZero-shot vs few-shotFew-shot limitationsOne-shot promptingLLM inference parametersChain-of-thought promptingPrompt elements appliedPrompt design best practicesPrompt structure for chat modelsIn-context learningAdvanced prompting techniques

A few sample questions

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

In your own words, what is prompt engineering and why does it matter when working with large language models?
What does the max tokens parameter control, and what are the practical consequences of setting it too low versus too high?
What is the concept of in-context learning, and how does it relate to few-shot prompting at a mechanistic level?

Related interviews

Mid
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

Context Engineering & System Prompt Design

Technical·~30 min
Staff
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

Frontier Topics: MoE, Multimodal LLMs, Reasoning & Model Merging

Technical·~30 min
Mid
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

Hallucination: Causes, Detection & Mitigation

Technical·~30 min
Mid
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

LLM Evaluation: Benchmarks, Metrics & Judge Models

Technical·~30 min
Senior
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

LLM Security: Prompt Injection, Jailbreaking & Defenses

Technical·~30 min
Mid
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

LLM Pre-Training: Data Curation & Scaling Laws

Technical·~30 min
Mid
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

Distributed Training Strategies for LLMs

Technical·~30 min
Senior
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

Preference Alignment: RLHF, DPO & GRPO

Technical·~30 min
Mid
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

Advanced Prompting Techniques

Technical·~30 min
Mid
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

LLM Quantization: Methods & Trade-offs

Technical·~30 min
Senior
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

LLM Inference Optimization: Throughput & Latency

Technical·~30 min
Mid
LLM / GenAI & Prompt/Context Engineering

RAG: Fundamentals & Pipeline Design

Technical·~30 min