The FDE Interview Process
Here’s exactly what to expect in your upcoming forward deployed engineering (FDE) interview process.
While FDE is new enough that there's no shared playbook like in SWE interviews, there’s a common pattern between all types of FDE interviews, across companies like Palantir, OpenAI, Google, and Databricks:
- Recruiter screen
- Technical screen
- Take-home assignment & presentation
- Practical coding round
- Decomposition round
- Behavioral round
Less common rounds, but still worth knowing about:
- Customer interaction simulation
- System design round
- Project/technical deep dive
Here’s a breakdown of each round and what to expect.
Recruiter screen
This is the opening conversation that’s more about assessing fit than skill, thus it’s usually non-technical.
Recruiters are checking whether you're willing to sit in a customer-facing role and, at some companies, whether you'll tolerate the working conditions the job demands.This is a good time to demonstrate your people skills, your previous experience relevant for the role, and demonstrate your genuine interest in the company.
Technical screen
The most common format is a standard data structures and algorithms (DS&A) assessment. The good news: the coding bar for FDEs is generally lower than for SWEs, so expect easy-to-medium coding questions.
Our coding fast track is the ideal way to prep for these questions. Our fast-track version is designed to help you focus on the core nuts and bolts of the interview, and excludes the high difficulty questions that aren’t present in the FDE coding rounds.
A rarer, newer format is rapid-fire technical questions spanning the full stack (app, data, AI). The breadth tests exactly what FDEs need to know while on deployment. Databricks runs this format.
Take-home assignment
This is a self-directed design exercise built around a realistic customer-style problem: an end-to-end system or pipeline you design and often build yourself. You typically get about a week to complete it, then present your work live to a team member or a panel.
The deliverable varies by company, from a written plan to a fully functioning prototype. Companies expecting a working solution will let you use AI to build it (in fact, they expect it), or you'll be building inside their existing ecosystem with the support that comes with it.
Examples include:
- Design a semantic search system for Amazon products, built so ChatGPT can access it (Asked at OpenAI)
- Build a proof of concept using Devin AI (Asked at Cognition)
- Design an end-to-end workflow for collecting an RLHF coding dataset to improve a model’s performance (Asked at Labelbox)
Practical coding round
In this round, you'll be asked to write real, working code rather than solve an algorithmic puzzle. This can take the shape of building a small project from a spec, extending an existing codebase, or debugging someone else's code.
Unlike a DS&A round, you're expected to use AI here, though the extent varies by company; some want research-only use, others expect you to drive a coding agent hard and defend what it produces.
To prepare for these, we’d recommend solving actual coding problems in real, multi-file systems. We break down each format (and how AI usage differs across them) in our practical coding course.
Decomposition round
In this round, you'll be handed a deliberately open-ended business problem and asked to scope and sketch a solution in about an hour. Examples include:
- Given a dataset of taxi trips with fields like fare, locations, times and distance, propose a solution that helps drivers and could ship within a week.
- Design an application to catalog and log species while exploring an unfamiliar environment.
This is a uniquely FDE interview round (in some ways, a hybrid of a classic system design problem and a PM product sense question). In this round you’re expected to:
- Identify stakeholders and pain points
- Brainstorm a solution
- Spec out the first minimum viable product (MVP)
- Consider what the next few MVPs will look like
- Handle a new stakeholder or changed requirements, if the interviewer introduces one
Behavioral round
This may be called the culture fit round, the leadership round, or the mission and values interview. On top of a dedicated behavioral round, some companies also sprinkle behavioral questions into the various rounds.
This round is crucial as it's where your manager and peer decide whether they'd actually want to work with you.
Examples include:
- Tell me about a time you had to tell leadership that their timeline was unrealistic.
- Tell me about a time you received negative feedback and how you handled it.
- How do you influence without authority?
As an FDE, you'll also face customer interaction questions on top of standard behavioral ones. These test how you'd handle clients while on deployment.
Customer interaction simulation
In this round, you'll be asked to design a solution within the company's ecosystem, then pitch it to the interviewer, who plays the role of the customer.
This round is rare and typically only appears for FDE roles that involve a pre-sales component.
System design round
If a company's process includes a decomp round, it won't also include a separate system design round. If it does include a system design round, expect it to be AI-flavored.
You'll be asked to design a system powered by AI, which means coming in familiar with how AI systems work, how they're optimized/scaled, and how response quality is ensured.
Project deep dive
This is a 45-minute presentation of your own past technical work, judged on business impact and technical craft. Think of it as a bring-your-own decomposition question.
But because it's bring-your-own, you're expected to go into far more depth than an on-the-spot decomp question would require.
The recruiter will tell you how technical the deep dive should be. Some companies signal this through naming alone: Cohere calls this the "architecture presentation," which tells you it leans closer to a bring-your-own system design question. In the same vein, OpenAI calls it “technical deep dive”.