The field is young enough that nobody has ten years of experience, so interviewers weight engineering judgement heavily over tool familiarity. The questions are less about what you have used and more about how you would know it was working.
Almost every candidate has now built something with a language model. That means the demo no longer differentiates anyone, and interviews have moved to the parts that are hard: making retrieval actually relevant, knowing whether a change made things worse, and handling text you did not write.
Retrieval, past the diagram
Everyone can draw the pipeline: embed the documents, embed the question, find the nearest, put them in the context. Interviewers have seen it. The questions are all about what makes it work badly.
Chunking. Too small and a chunk loses the context that made it meaningful. Too large and the relevant sentence is diluted by everything around it. There is no universal size, and saying so with a reason is better than naming one.
