Explain the concept of 'Prompt Engineering'.

Example Answer

The way I'd explain it in an interview is this: Prompt engineering is the practice of designing instructions so a model produces more reliable, useful, and appropriately scoped outputs. At a high level, it means turning a vague request into a structured interaction with clear role, task, context, constraints, and output format.

What matters is not clever wording for its own sake. Good prompt engineering reduces ambiguity, improves consistency, and makes the model easier to evaluate. In production systems, it also helps with safety, hallucination control, formatting discipline, and tool use.

So I think of prompt engineering as interface design for language models. The prompt is the control surface that shapes model behavior.

What matters in an interview is not only knowing the definition, but being able to connect it back to how it changes modeling, evaluation, or deployment decisions in practice.

Common Poor Answer

A weak answer says prompt engineering is just "asking better questions" and misses structure, evaluation, and production reliability.