Build a CLI that ingests a folder of documents and outputs a JSON index of extracted entities.
A classic FDE take-home shape: messy real documents in, structured index out. The grade is in the seams between reader, extractor, and writer, and in what happens when one file is garbage.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A classic FDE take-home shape: messy real documents in, structured index out. The grade is in the seams between reader, extractor, and writer, and in what happens when one file is garbage.
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.
