Dataford
Interview QuestionsInterview GuidesExperiencesMock InterviewsPricing
Get started

Build Biology Literature RAG Assistant

HardGenerative AI & LLMs00:00
Practice interviewer
In session
5 left
00:00

Your question is Build Biology Literature RAG Assistant. Take a moment with it on the right.

Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).

You need to log in / sign up to chat or submit.

Problem

Scenario

You are building a research assistant for scientists who ask technical questions about large language models, transformer architectures, and AlphaFold-style biological applications. The assistant must answer from a curated corpus of papers, internal notes, and benchmark summaries rather than free-form model knowledge. Users expect concise, citation-backed answers they can trust during literature review and experiment planning. The initial launch targets a few hundred researchers, but the corpus already contains tens of thousands of documents and will grow quickly.

Constraints

  • p95 latency must stay under 2,500 ms per query
  • Cost ceiling is $12,000/month at 20,000 queries per day
  • Unsupported factual claims must stay below 2% on a 300-question golden set
  • The system must resist prompt injection from retrieved PDFs, notes, or user text
  • Answers about biological claims must cite source passages or refuse

Available Resources

  • A curated corpus of 40,000 papers, internal summaries, and experiment notes
  • Access to a GPT-4-class or Claude-class model and a smaller low-cost model
  • Hybrid search infrastructure with BM25 and dense vector retrieval
  • 15 domain experts who can label a golden set and review failures

Question

How would you build this system so it can answer first-round interview-style questions about LLMs, transformers, and AlphaFold in biological settings while meeting the latency, cost, grounding, and safety requirements? Explain the design you would choose and how you would evaluate and operate it in production.