Forward Deployed Engineer interview question · Most asked
A RAG assistant gives confident answers from outdated documents. How do you fix it?
Summary
Fix retrieval: curate authoritative sources with content owners, index metadata (status, effective date, audience, country, permissions), filter and rank for freshness and authority, require citations with dates, let the assistant say it can't find a current answer, and evaluate retrieval separately with a question set.
Longer Answer
Permission-aware retrieval also prevents users seeing content they shouldn't. Bigger models don't fix bad context.
Key Points
- Retrieval, not the model.
- Metadata filters and freshness.
- Citations; 'I don't know'.
- Evaluate retrieval separately.
Deep dive: Forward Deployed Engineering in Practice: Confidently Wrong Answers From the Wiki
Explanation
What interviewers look for
Correct diagnosis and practical retrieval engineering.
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