Adapt a pretrained LLM for intelligence analysis inside an air-gapped facility, on classified data you are never allowed to see.
No data leaves, you cannot pre-inspect the corpus, and your toolchain arrives on a single USB. Design adaptation and evaluation when you will never observe a single input or output.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
No data leaves, you cannot pre-inspect the corpus, and your toolchain arrives on a single USB. Design adaptation and evaluation when you will never observe a single input or output.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
