Interview questions
Cohere AI engineer interview questions (2026)
6 real interview questions reported by engineers who interviewed at Cohere, spanning Software Engineering, AI Engineering. Every question is scored against a golden answer on the things Cohere actually grades — architecture, token efficiency, security and correctness — not just whether your code runs.
Cohere Software Engineering questions
- Template variable substitution with validation and defaults
Implement a top-level `solve(payload)` function that renders a prompt template containing `{{variable}}` and `{{variable|default}}` placeholders. ## The solve contract `payload`
- Conversation history manager fails to truncate old messages properly
A customer support chatbot crashes with a context length error after long conversations. The conversation history management is supposed to prevent this but it has a bug. Find it.
- Reranker degrades pipeline performance despite correct isolation testing behavior.
A retrieval pipeline was upgraded with a reranker to improve result quality. Engineers expected better answers but accuracy actually got worse. The reranker works correctly in isol
Cohere AI Engineering questions
- RAG Pipeline Missing Document Metadata During Chunk Ingestion
When users ask follow-up questions about which source a RAG answer came from, the system cannot tell them — it only knows the chunk content, not which document it came from. Find t
- Access control filter placement before reranker causes leakage bug
Your RAG pipeline uses a reranker to improve result quality, but users from different regions are seeing each other private documents in results. The access control filter is not w
- Optimise a RAG pipeline that is 3x over token budget
Your production RAG pipeline is consuming 3x more tokens than budgeted. Current setup: retrieving top-20 chunks and passing all 20 to the LLM with full metadata on each chunk. At 1
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