Software Engineer Interview Prep Podcast
Jun 6, 2026 · 50 min · 11 segments
SEASON 1 — "The Shift" Interview an engineer who transitioned from backend → AI engineer. Their story IS the season premise.
Imagine coming into work, uh, on a Monday morning.
You sit down, haven't even had your coffee yet, and you open up your AWS or, you know, your provider billing dashboard.
Oh, no.
I know exactly where this is going.
Right.
And you are staring at a twelve thousand dollar charge for a weekend prototype feature that, like, maybe five people use.
Yeah, that is, that is literal nightmare fuel.
It's that moment where your stomach just drops through the floor, right? You are staring at a financial catastrophe generated by your own code.
It absolutely still gives me cold sweats just thinking about it.
And yeah, the scariest part is that the code we wrote was actually, by all traditional backend standards, incredibly robust.
Right.
You didn't write bad code.
Exactly.
We built this standard internal dashboard tool for our ops team, and, uh, someone had the bright idea to add a button that said, like, "Summarize this user's activity."
Seems completely harmless.
Totally harmless.
We wired it up to a shiny new large language model API, and during local testing, I mean, it was magical.
You click the button, wait maybe three seconds, and boom, a beautifully formatted paragraph summarizing fifty rows of tabular data.
So it worked.
It worked flawlessly.
So we pushed it to production on a Friday, patted ourselves on the back, and went home for the weekend.
Oh, the classic Friday deployment trap.
Never deploy on a Friday.
Never.
But, uh, this goes so far beyond a typical Friday deployment where maybe a database migration locks up a table.
Imagine coming into work, uh, on a Monday morning.
You sit down, haven't even had your coffee yet, and you open up your AWS or, you know, your provider billing dashboard.
Oh, no.
I know exactly where this is going.
Right.
And you are staring at a twelve thousand dollar charge for a weekend prototype feature that, like, maybe five people use.
Yeah, that is, that is literal nightmare fuel.
It's that moment where your stomach just drops through the floor, right? You are staring at a financial catastrophe generated by your own code.
It absolutely still gives me cold sweats just thinking about it.
And yeah, the scariest part is that the code we wrote was actually, by all traditional backend standards, incredibly robust.
Right.
You didn't write bad code.
Exactly.
We built this standard internal dashboard tool for our ops team, and, uh, someone had the bright idea to add a button that said, like, "Summarize this user's activity."
Seems completely harmless.
Totally harmless.
We wired it up to a shiny new large language model API, and during local testing, I mean, it was magical.
You click the button, wait maybe three seconds, and boom, a beautifully formatted paragraph summarizing fifty rows of tabular data.
So it worked.
It worked flawlessly.
So we pushed it to production on a Friday, patted ourselves on the back, and went home for the weekend.
Oh, the classic Friday deployment trap.
Never deploy on a Friday.
Never.
But, uh, this goes so far beyond a typical Friday deployment where maybe a database migration locks up a table.
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