You have a fixed latency and cost budget at scale. Walk me through quantization vs distillation to hit it.
Two compression levers with very different bills. The arithmetic that decides between them, when to stack both, and the eval discipline that keeps a 'cheaper' model from quietly tanking your hardest 10% of queries.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Two compression levers with very different bills. The arithmetic that decides between them, when to stack both, and the eval discipline that keeps a 'cheaper' model from quietly tanking your hardest 10% of queries.
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.
