Scenario-style questions for senior architect interviews—answered in plain English, with examples, recap tables, and Mermaid diagrams. All seventeen sections are published below (Q1–265). Pair with the theory Q&A bank for vocabulary depth.
Layers, gateways, streaming, state, multi-team platforms, mixed inputs.
Cost envelopes, cache, queues, batching, K8s, routing, autoscaling.
Ingestion, hybrid retrieval ACLs, GraphRAG, citations, SQL+RAG.
Tools, sandboxes, memory, workflows, HITL, observability, injection.
Realtime ingest, versioning, CDC, lineage, graph + vector.
Governance, routing, caching, ROI, tiers, shared GPU clusters.
Breakers, idempotency, DR, 429s, validation, canaries, degradation.
Injection, PII, GDPR/HIPAA, RBAC, audits, threat modeling.
Tracing, privacy-safe logs, offline/online quality, probes, A/B, human labels, red-team CI.
Fair-share GPUs, quotas, isolation, CMK, residency cells, tier migrations, SLAs.
RAG vs FT, multi-LoRA serving, data governance, DPO/RLHF, registry, rollback, synthetic data.
Hybrid fusion, learned sparse, late interaction, rerank economics, multi-index, session state.
Mobile/WebGPU, quantization, OTA models, offline RAG, thermals, air-gap, weight protection.
Domain packs, legal/health/finance, dev tools, support, IoT, gov, locale, partners.
Metrics, pricing, differentiation, phased rollout, SE motion, change management, build vs buy, deprecation, international GTM.
Enterprise controls, model risk, harm IR, fairness, carbon, IP, vendor diligence, explainability, board reporting, exam readiness.
Interview narrative, when not to use LLMs, launch checklist, ADRs, M&A diligence, senior signals, socio-technical thesis.