The 10 Questions That Decide Whether You’re an AI Engineer or Just an AI User

I failed my first AI engineer interview. Here’s the complete playbook I built to never fail again. The email came at PM on a Tuesday. “Thank you for taking the time to interview with us. After careful consideration, we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates…” I stared at my laptop screen for a long time. The blue light felt accusatory. It had been a 90-minute technical interview for a Senior AI Engineer role at a company I’d spent three years wanting to work at. I had shipped LLM features. I had written RAG pipelines.