Build a document parser: PDF to layout-aware text to clean chunks.
Most RAG projects do not die at the retriever, they die at ingestion. Naive PDF extraction interleaves columns into nonsense, shreds tables, and stamps the footer into all 4,000 chunks. Here is the parser that survives real documents.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Most RAG projects do not die at the retriever, they die at ingestion. Naive PDF extraction interleaves columns into nonsense, shreds tables, and stamps the footer into all 4,000 chunks. Here is the parser that survives real documents.
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.
