Defend a high-stakes generation pipeline against jailbreaks and hallucination at the same time.
Two failure modes, one architecture. Why no single guardrail holds, the defense-in-depth layers that assume the model will be broken, and the design rule that limits the blast radius when prompt filters inevitably fail.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Two failure modes, one architecture. Why no single guardrail holds, the defense-in-depth layers that assume the model will be broken, and the design rule that limits the blast radius when prompt filters inevitably fail.
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.
