Design the path from a notebook pilot to a production ML system at a customer, end to end.
The capstone panel question that ties the whole track together. The spine, data, training, deployment, monitoring, operating model, plus the maturity-staging judgment that separates architects from slide-readers.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The capstone panel question that ties the whole track together. The spine, data, training, deployment, monitoring, operating model, plus the maturity-staging judgment that separates architects from slide-readers.
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.
