Agent Engineer Interview Experience

Can you walk me through your background and what languages you're comfortable with?

I gave a high level summary of the software work I'd done and kept it pretty broad. I told him I was strongest in Python and didn't really have TypeScript experience.

I mapped the spreadsheet idea to a graph problem and treated it as cycle detection across cell references. The interviewer said I could start brute force and then optimize, but I just went straight to the more efficient graph-search solution and wrote that out as my main implementation. There weren't extra constraints piled on afterward. The interviewer was also pretty chill about the format and even said I didn't have to narrate every keystroke if that was distracting.

I built a simple conversational agent on top of the OpenAI API using a basic loop plus tool calls. I kept it lightweight instead of using a bigger framework. I explained why I chose the features I chose, what success metrics I would watch, and what observability I would want if this were live. The main technical thing I had to learn along the way was how tool calling actually worked, and I restarted the architecture a few times before it felt right.

Walk us through the agent you built and why you made the design choices you made.

I expected this to be a real demo, but they had already run my code from the instructions I submitted a few days earlier, so the live part stayed pretty high level. I shared my screen, talked through the architecture, and explained why I had made certain choices. They asked a few high-level questions, but it was not nearly as deep a dive as I expected.

Give us a short 5 to 10 minute explanation of a technical topic of your choice.

I chose to explain how RAG works. I treated it like a mini teaching exercise where the point was to take something technical and explain it in a simple, concise way instead of trying to sound overly fancy.

Walk me through your resume and why you made each move in your career.

I mostly walked through the reasoning behind each step in my career and how one role led to the next. In my case the whole conversation stayed very anchored on my resume rather than drifting into abstract leadership questions.

I answered with examples of stakeholder-heavy work and the projects I felt best about. The tone was broad and standard, not adversarial. It felt like they were mainly checking how I think about collaboration, ownership, and what kinds of work I value.