How often should the customer retrain their model, and what has to be true before you automate it?
"It depends" is correct and unhelpful. The decay-curve method that replaces guesswork with measurement, trigger-based vs scheduled retraining, and the safety rails without which auto-retraining is an outage generator.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
"It depends" is correct and unhelpful. The decay-curve method that replaces guesswork with measurement, trigger-based vs scheduled retraining, and the safety rails without which auto-retraining is an outage generator.
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.
