AI Agents in Compliance
A study guide for AI engineering and solutions-architect interviews focused on agentic AI in regulated finance — AML, KYC, sanctions, RegTech. 17 interactive HTML guides with sticky navigation, syntax-highlighted code, copy buttons, drill modes, and dark mode.
If you only have an hour
Open 00-START-HERE first. Then drill 15-interview-questions with drill mode on. Reread 16-day-of the morning of.
Drill: 28 Questions
Hide-show answers · timer · progress
Drill: 11 Coding Problems
Multiple approaches · drill mode
Hands-On: Build an MCP
45 min · Python · Claude Desktop
Section A · Orient
00
Start Here
Master index, study schedule, key reframe. Read first.
01
The Role Decoded
JD breakdown, tech stack purpose, compliance constraints, what to ask them.
02
Positioning From Scratch
Mindset before content — how to interview honestly when starting fresh on the technical side.
Section B · AI Engineering Concepts
03
AI Development Fundamentals
Models, prompts, tool use, structured output, prompt caching, prompt injection, observability.
04
MCP Deep Dive
MCP protocol primitives, transports, auth. Plus 8 drillable interview probes with strong answers.
04 · Hands-on
Build an MCP Server
45-minute tutorial. From
pip install to a working agent in Claude Desktop. Compliance-flavored. Plus 4 stretch goals.
05
Harnesses & Agents
"Harness" disambiguation, the agent loop, Anthropic's Building Effective Agents patterns, frameworks compared.
06
RAG Applied
Production RAG — chunking, hybrid search, reranking, agentic RAG, Ragas evals, 5 failure modes, drillable probes.
07
Evals
Eval frameworks, LLM-as-judge, eval-driven development, agent evals.
08
Error Handling for AI
AI-specific failure modes, retry/repair patterns, idempotency, fail-safe defaults.
09
Audit Trails
Event schemas, versioning, GDPR vs retention, model risk management.
Section B · Stretch tutorials (continue from 04)
04a · 25 min
Add an MCP Resource
Expose authoritative documents the model can reference. Tools vs resources — the distinction matters.
04b · 25 min
Add a Prompt Template
Ship a one-click compliance workflow as a slash command. Evaluator-optimizer pattern materialized.
04c · 30 min
Hit a Real Sanctions API
Replace the mock with OpenSanctions. Timeout, fallback, caching, structured errors — production tool design.
04d · 30 min
HTTP Transport + JWT Auth
Run the server over Streamable HTTP. Add JWT-scoped auth. Now you can answer "stdio vs HTTP, when?" with conviction.
Section C · Coding (DSA)
10
Coding Fundamentals
Pattern menu, arrays, hashing, strings, sorting, DFS/BFS, two pointers, sliding window, prefix sum, Big-O cheat sheet.
11
Coding Problems Worked Out
The three problems your notes called out — Longest Common Prefix, Valid Anagram, Subarray Sum Equals K — plus 8 companions. Drill mode hides solutions; multiple approaches per problem; progress tracker.
Section D · Production / Cloud
12
Data Pipelines
ETL/ELT, batch vs streaming, Airflow/Spark/Kafka, RAG indexing pipelines, AWS vs GCP shapes.
13
Model Deployment
AWS (Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda) and GCP (Vertex AI, Cloud Run). Two reference architectures. CI/CD for AI.
Section E · Reference & Execution
14
Compliance Context
AML / KYC / SAR / EDD vocabulary, jurisdictions, crypto-exchange-specific wrinkles.
15
Practice Interview Questions
28 Q&A across 8 sections. Drill mode hides answers by default. Section nav, per-question practice tracker, progress saved locally.
16
Day-Of Tactics
Structural moves, traps to watch, recovery patterns, questions to ask them, closing statement. Reread morning of.
Study Paths
If you have 7+ days
- Day 1: 01, 02 (orient) → 03 (AI dev fundamentals)
- Day 2: 04 (MCP deep dive), then do the build tutorial
- Day 3: 05, 06 (harnesses, RAG)
- Day 4: 07, 08, 09 (evals, error handling, audit)
- Day 5: 10, 11 (coding — drill problems on a timer)
- Day 6: 12, 13 (pipelines, deployment) + try one MCP stretch (04a-d)
- Day 7: Drill 15 in HTML drill mode. Read 14 and 16. Sleep.
If you have 2-3 days
01, 02, 03, 04 (deep-dive + build), 05, 07, 08, 11 (do the 3 named problems), 15 (drill), 16. Skim everything else.
If you have < 24 hours
01, 02, 11 (do the 3 named problems on paper), 15 (drill all 28), 16. Skim 04, 05, 07 headings only.