Your RAG system struggles with PDFs containing tables and complex layouts. How do you fix parsing?
Garbage parsing means garbage retrieval, and naive PDF text extraction wrecks tables and reading order. The signal is fixing the parser, not the retriever. Here is the answer.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Garbage parsing means garbage retrieval, and naive PDF text extraction wrecks tables and reading order. The signal is fixing the parser, not the retriever. Here is the answer.
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.
