Cohere MLE Interview Questions (2026)

Questions reported from Cohere machine learning engineer interviews. This bank tracks 9 questions asked at Cohere (5 with free model answers). Practice them live with DeepOffer's AI voice interviewer.

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#32 Architect Approximate Retrieval Over More Than 100 Million Embeddings ★
#51 Describe mixture-of-experts and how it grows model capacity without growing per-token compute. ★
#90 Give a decision framework for choosing between prompting, RAG, and fine-tuning, with cost and latency attached. ★
#217 Explain what a reranker is, when to use one, and what a cross-encoder costs you. ★
#218 Evaluate a RAG pipeline's retrieval and generation quality separately.
#233 Explain what causes semantic drift in embedding search and how to detect it.
#234 Design a two-stage retrieval pipeline with an embedding model and a reranker, and explain when the reranker earns its latency.
#314 Implement a token-bucket rate limiter, then make it distributed. ★
#383 Describe a time you owned an ambiguous problem end to end without much direction.