orchestration

Multi-agent is the most over-prescribed architecture in the industry. A staff-level answer is a decision framework driven by task structure and context limits, with the orchestration failure modes named before the interviewer asks.

Asked constantly in GenAI loops, and most answers are marketing-page recitals. The version that scores: classify by what each actually is, data framework, integration toolkit, graph runtime, then give the selection criteria that outlive all three names.

The hard parts are not the four roles. They are the communication substrate, a termination condition that is not just a retry cap, and stopping the Coder from forgetting the ticket after five repair cycles.

Five LLM agents over a hundred steps, and the bar is zero contradictions with a 500-page contract. The real test is the state and grounding layer, not the agent prompts.

The obvious engineering answer is to rewrite the notebooks properly and schedule them. Do that and you will have built something correct that the people who own the work can no longer maintain.

'Retrain weekly' is the answer interviewers let you finish before dismantling it. The four trigger types, how to stop a drift alarm from causing a retraining storm, and why the trigger question is really a cost-and-staleness trade.