Forward Deployed Engineer Interview Experience
Interview process
The difficulty was not in the technical, but in the behavioral questions. It seemed like there was a hidden rubric beyond the basics of getting things done that were not necessarily apparent at first glance. Perhaps the role of the FDE is to take in social cues and have an instinct with human interaction that they're judging for here. It seems like they really deeply care about why you want to join the company and the team. It's not really something you can cosplay because they will drill you with different questions from multiple interviewers. I love Stripe as a product isn't going to suffice. Perhaps read their blogs and other online resources about the company culture. They seem to highly value people who work autonomously to scope, design, implement, and deploy solutions while also doing a bit of project management for the parts of projects that do require more resources.
- Recruiter screen
- Technical interview
- Phone interview
- Final round
Interview tips
It's a hard interview loop to prep because the debugging tests some pretty standard concepts, the systems design and project implementation aren't that crazy if you've interviewed at other places. It seems like the behavioral is really the key and have those standard stories prepped in a way that shines you in a positive and experienced way.
Company culture
Everyone seems to genuinely love working at Stripe and overall quite content with their job. They put in extra hours on occasions because they want to, not because they have to.
Questions asked
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
Scope an app implementation given a list of features and determine what features to cut or prioritize
Build a full stack prototype that serves data, fetches it from an API, and renders it to the user. Take into consideration performance and user experience trade-offs.
Role play a pair coding situation where a client has problems with the SDK. How would you interact with the client to figure out the bug and provide a fix?
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