How would you adapt an LLM to a specialist domain like law or medicine, end to end?
The staged recipe is the easy half. The half that sinks real projects is data licensing, an evaluation bar that needs actual domain experts, and knowing which parts of the problem fine-tuning cannot solve at all.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The staged recipe is the easy half. The half that sinks real projects is data licensing, an evaluation bar that needs actual domain experts, and knowing which parts of the problem fine-tuning cannot solve at all.
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.
