FDE Interview Questions: The RAG System
Explore key interview questions for Forward Deployed Engineers related to Retrieval Augmented Generation systems. Learn to explain retrieval methods, evaluate system performance, handle real-world production constraints, adapt architecture to new requirements, and address FDE-specific role challenges. This lesson helps you prepare to discuss design decisions, trade-offs, and operational scenarios in technical interviews using a financial knowledge assistant case study.
After presenting a system design in an interview, the conversation shifts. The interviewer will ask questions around the choices made in the design, the tradeoffs behind them, and sometimes introduce a concrete change to see how the architecture holds. Some questions draw on general RAG knowledge; others are specific to the knowledge assistant case. The questions below are organized by topic. Try answering each one before clicking Show Answer. We start with the retrieval layer, where interviewers tend to push hardest.
Retrieval design
Interviewers ask questions across the retrieval layer of a RAG system, covering areas like search method, reranking, chunking strategy, and query transformation. Answering well means explaining the ...