You want to distill a frontier API model into your own smaller model. What stops you?
The technique works and everybody knows it works. The interview is not testing whether you can generate the training set; it is testing whether you know what you are agreeing to when you do.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The technique works and everybody knows it works. The interview is not testing whether you can generate the training set; it is testing whether you know what you are agreeing to when you do.
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.
