Design a PII redaction system for an LLM pipeline, PII enters at user input, retrieved context, tool results, and output. Guard all four.
The four-point redaction design is becoming the standard FDE privacy round. Most candidates fortify the chat box and lose on the other three doors, here's the full design, including the de-redaction map that makes it usable.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The four-point redaction design is becoming the standard FDE privacy round. Most candidates fortify the chat box and lose on the other three doors, here's the full design, including the de-redaction map that makes it usable.
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.