You have no labels on production traffic. How do you monitor RAG retrieval quality before users complain?
Golden sets catch what you anticipated. The harder problem is the live traffic you never labeled. The answer that scores layers cheap proxy signals against a small anchored golden set and knows what each can and cannot tell you.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Golden sets catch what you anticipated. The harder problem is the live traffic you never labeled. The answer that scores layers cheap proxy signals against a small anchored golden set and knows what each can and cannot tell you.
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.
