Build a 10M-sample instruction-tuning dataset from 100B web docs. Design the pipeline.
The naive pipeline gives you 10 million 'summarize this paragraph' pairs and a model that can only summarize paragraphs. The hard part is diversity and quality control at 100-billion-document scale, not the generation call.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The naive pipeline gives you 10 million 'summarize this paragraph' pairs and a model that can only summarize paragraphs. The hard part is diversity and quality control at 100-billion-document scale, not the generation call.
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.
