Should PII redaction live at the AI gateway or in the application layer? Argue the trade-offs.
An architecture question with a defensible right answer, and interviewers are tired of 'it depends.' Here's the split that survives both the platform team's consistency argument and the app team's context argument.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
An architecture question with a defensible right answer, and interviewers are tired of 'it depends.' Here's the split that survives both the platform team's consistency argument and the app team's context argument.
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.