Tell me about a project where you had a significant impact on the technical direction of the product.

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Anonymous · Accepted Answer

💬 Question: Tell me about a project where you significantly influenced the
product’s technical direction.

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⭐️ Answer:

Situation: Sure... at CBRE, I owned Ellis AI, our enterprise knowledge platform.
Early testing showed that a basic semantic search approach struggled with
precise business terms across more than 100,000 documents.

Task: I needed to improve answer quality without creating unacceptable latency
or cost.

Action: I recommended moving toward hybrid retrieval, combining keyword and
semantic search, with reranking and stronger context assembly. I worked with
engineering and data science to test chunking, embeddings, prompts, and ranking
through a golden dataset and online experiments. I also pushed for trace-level
monitoring so we could see where retrieval failed instead of treating the LLM as
a black box.

Result: Retrieval accuracy improved by 25%. More importantly, the approach
became the technical foundation for scaling the platform beyond one million
documents, with better quality controls and production debugging. My key
learning was to frame technical direction around the user outcome and make
quality, latency, and cost trade-offs explicit.

Tell me about a project where you had a significant impact on the technical direction of the product.

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