A customer refuses to send PII to an LLM API. What are your options?
Zero retention, private endpoints, redaction pipelines, or open weights in their VPC, the four-rung ladder for PII-sensitive deployments, and the discovery questions that pick the right rung.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Zero retention, private endpoints, redaction pipelines, or open weights in their VPC, the four-rung ladder for PII-sensitive deployments, and the discovery questions that pick the right rung.
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.
