Walk me through what happens, tensor by tensor, in one forward pass of a decoder-only transformer.
Reported at:Anthropic
Model answer
A concise answer you could give in the room. Try your own version first, then compare.
What the interviewer is probing
Depth and structure: whether you can break an open question into parts, reason from first principles and support your claims with concrete examples and numbers.
How to structure your answer
- 1Restate the question and clarify the assumptions or scope.
- 2Give a crisp high-level answer first (the 30-second version).
- 3Go deeper on the mechanism, with an example, numbers or a sketch.
- 4Discuss trade-offs, failure modes and what you would do in practice.
Key points to hit
0/3 revealedTry to answer each one out loud before revealing it.
How do you structure an open-ended answer?
How deep should you go?
What if you don't know?
Common pitfalls
- Rambling without a structure.
- Staying abstract with no example.
- Ignoring the trade-offs.
Likely follow-ups
- How would you implement this?
- What breaks at scale?
- How would you measure success?
Source: Outcome School · ai-engineering-interview-questions-company-wise. Question compiled by Outcome School from publicly reported interview experiences (Apache-2.0). The guidance on this page is original.