Design an automated retraining pipeline. What should trigger retraining?
'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.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
'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.
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.