Prompt Engineering Interview Prep

Prompt Engineering Interview Topics

• Zero-shot vs few-shot — zero-shot: model knowledge only; few-shot: 2-5 examples teach format and pattern
• Chain-of-Thought — step-by-step reasoning before answering improves math and logic accuracy
• Temperature — 0 for deterministic/factual, 0.7+ for creative tasks
• System prompt — persistent global instructions defining persona, constraints, and out-of-scope behaviour
• Prompt injection — malicious input overrides instructions; sanitise inputs, separate data from instructions
• RAG prompting — inject retrieved context; instruct model to answer only from provided sources
• Hallucination mitigation — use RAG, require citations, ask for uncertainty, low temperature
• ReAct — Thought+Action+Observation loop for tool-using agents
• Self-consistency — run prompt multiple times, return majority answer for high-stakes tasks
• Prompt evaluation — build test suites with expected outputs, measure accuracy and format compliance