Forward Deployed Engineer interview question · Most asked
How do you build an evaluation set for a customer's AI use case?
Summary
Collect 100-300 real, anonymised cases that cover the variety and edge cases; have customer experts confirm expected outputs; define metrics that match the task (per-field accuracy, citation correctness, rubric scores); segment results by type, language or format; run on every change and keep adding confirmed production errors.
Longer Answer
Agree release thresholds with the customer and block regressions on critical fields. Handler or user edits are excellent ongoing signal.
Key Points
- Real, representative cases.
- Expert-confirmed answers.
- Task-specific, segmented metrics.
- Gate every change.
Deep dive: Forward Deployed Engineering in Practice: The Prompt Change That Broke Extraction
Explanation
What interviewers look for
Rigour and customer involvement in quality.
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