What are the types of agent memory (short-term, long-term, episodic, semantic), and how do you use each?
Agents need memory beyond the context window, and 'just store the history' is the wrong answer. The signal is distinguishing the memory types and mapping each to a storage and retrieval strategy. Here is the answer.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Agents need memory beyond the context window, and 'just store the history' is the wrong answer. The signal is distinguishing the memory types and mapping each to a storage and retrieval strategy. Here is the answer.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.