Background In the age of AI, how do we hire the right people? You don't want to end up with someone who's great at LeetCode but has never touched Claude Code and has zero interest in learning AI-assisted programming. But compared to LeetCode or traditional software knowledge, AI is still very young. So how do we gauge whether a candidate can stay productive at the company over the next few years? A Note on Terminology "AI" is a broad term that works fine for general audiences. But as professionals, we should be precise. AI covers many subfields — deep learning, supervised learning, large language models, and more. This article focuses specifically on interview questions within the LLM space, so for simplicity I'll use "AI" to mean LLM throughout. This article also doesn't cover hiring for LLM training roles — that's outside my expertise, and frankly it's a more mature field with established interview practices. The focus here is on LLM application engineering.…