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Design a deep research agent that answers complex questions by searching and synthesizing many sources.

The modern agentic system-design question. The signal is the plan, search, read, synthesize, verify loop with per-claim citations, plus bounding cost and latency. The hard parts are not the writing.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

The modern agentic system-design question. The signal is the plan, search, read, synthesize, verify loop with per-claim citations, plus bounding cost and latency. The hard parts are not the writing.

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LEARN THE BACKGROUND

These lessons teach the material this question tests, in order and from the beginning.

Agent Engineering·The ecosystem you will be asked aboutPremium14mThe four agents companies actually buildCoding, browser, research and data agents are where most agent work and most agent hiring is. Each has one property that dominates its design, and knowing which one is what separates a specific answer from a generic one in an interview.

UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY

Next in this trackDesign memory for a personal AI assistant that remembers users across sessions.Next in this trackDesign a multi-agent customer support system with escalation to humans.Next in this trackDesign an LLM inference platform (vLLM-as-a-service) serving many models and teams.

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