Staff Security Infrastructure Engineer Interview Experience
The security question came down to making sure an agent can never access more than the user it’s acting for.
Interview process
My process ran basically through the whole month. It started with a recruiter screen, then an online assessment, then a hiring manager round, and then a full onsite with five separate one-hour interviews. The OA itself was a pretty standard LeetCode-style hard, but the later rounds felt very different. The part that really stood out was having to design an agentic AI system for a code explorer use case and then getting pushed deep on implementation details like how agent memory works internally and when to use graph search versus semantic search. It was a very rigorous process.
- Recruiter screen
- Online assessment
- Phone interview
- Final round
Interview rounds
2 questions across 4 roundsRecruiter screen
Overview
This was just the initial recruiter screen to get the process going. Nothing unusual stood out to me there.
Online assessment
1 questionOverview
This was a LeetCode-style hard and felt like a pretty standard coding gate before the deeper rounds.
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
Solve a LeetCode-style hard problem.
I just remember it as a hard coding problem in the usual online assessment format. It felt standard compared with what came later in the process.
Phone interview
Overview
This was the hiring manager round between the OA and onsite. It felt like the bridge into the much more technical onsite.
Final round
1 questionOverview
The onsite was five different one-hour rounds, and this was where it got really rigorous. They went way past high-level architecture and kept drilling into implementation details around agentic AI design.
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
Design an agentic AI system for a code explorer use case.
How does agent memory work internally?
How do you differentiate between graph search and semantic search?
How do you scale it?
What areas need stronger security so user-level information is preserved and agent access matches user access?
How do you avoid vectorizing the same things again and again and reuse that across distributed systems throughout the globe?
I had to design an agentic AI system for a code explorer use case I had worked on before. They drilled into how agent memory would work under the hood, when I would choose graph search versus semantic search, and how I would scale retrieval. Then they pushed on security, specifically how I would preserve user-level information so the agent only has the same access as the user. They also cared a lot about not re-vectorizing the same content and being able to reuse it across distributed systems globally.
Interview tips
I would not prep for this at a hand-wavy architecture level. I would make sure I can talk through the scaling piece really concretely, especially how I would avoid re-vectorizing the same data over and over and how I would reuse it across distributed systems globally. I would also have a very clear answer for the security side, like how user-level information stays preserved and how agent access is exactly the same as user access.
Company culture
They definitely seemed to value breadth, but that did not mean I could stay broad. They would poke into individual concepts until they could tell whether I was actually deep there.
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