Forward deployed engineer interview questions
How forward deployed interviews work at each company, the questions candidates and employers have published, and practice questions with response guides.
Updated
FDE interview question bank
Every question reported or published for forward deployed roles, paraphrased, with its source and evidence type. Answer aloud and state your assumptions before you look anything up.
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Design a product that uses historical taxi-trip data to help drivers.
Given a set of jobs with dependencies, return a valid order to execute them.
Topological-sort style; a similar problem is reported in S13
Find and fix the defect that causes duplicate alerts to fire.
Describe the most ambiguous project you have owned.
Explain why your proposed solution needs to be built and what changes for the user if it works.
Tell me about a time you worked with unclear customer requirements.
Given a set of users, determine which one is the most active.
Build something that gathers data about life on a planet.
Third-party guide S1 lists a similar prompt: catalog species while exploring an unfamiliar environment
Work a decomposition problem that required learning and writing SQL during the interview.
Design a system for internal company teams to organize meetups around hobbies, then code one core feature.
Approximate year; candidate says interview was about two years before a 2026 post
Using documentation for an obscure programming language, solve a set of problems with it.
Candidate attributes rejection to asking questions that signalled too much hand-holding
Design Yelp, then extend the design as the interviewer adds complexity.
How would you optimize a given scheduling system?
Debug a broken API service: trace logs, find bottlenecks, fix memory leaks.
Integrate an unfamiliar library into an existing system within a few minutes.
Write specific SQL queries with no way to execute them.
Candidate was told no preparation was needed; failed this round
Solve a problem about playing a unique card game.
Online assessment with one SQL task, one API-call task and one algorithm problem.
Given a vague real-world problem and a described database, design an application.
Feedback: should have split into subproblems first
Phone screen: discuss a decomposition design, then code a feature linking employees by shared interests.
Only the public overview of this post is readable; details are behind a login. Year approximate
Why do you want to be an FDSE specifically, and why Palantir?
Also reported in S18 and S9
Using a new object-oriented query language, solve a data problem and explain each step.
Interviewer corrected mistakes live and asked for fixes
Break down a large ambiguous problem: problem statement, metrics, root causes, datasets and joins, a test query, and a pilot.
What are you weakest at that could stop you succeeding here, and how would you handle it with a customer?
Why Palantir, what do you know about what we actually build, and what do you believe in?
Improve the New York City subway, or decide where to build new lines.
Guide attributes practice prompts to a Palantir interviewer; not a verified candidate report
Detect money laundering or fraudulent tax returns.
Same attribution caveat as above
Design a sync system between two employee record systems.
Guide labels samples as reported by candidates without individual citations
Find and fix a double-counting bug in a HashMap-based tallying function.
Debug a program modelling infection spread across a social graph.
How would you troubleshoot a Palantir deployment that is running slowly?
CleverPrep question pattern; mixes candidate reports and editorial synthesis without separating them
Design an air-gapped deployment architecture.
Same caveat as above
Design an application that lets users share their interests.
Implement search(user_id, users) for the interest-sharing application.
How would you make meeting-history lookups faster?
How would you speed up searching interests if the data must remain an array?
Why this company, why the government domain, and why the FDSE role?
Walk through your internship project in detail. What did you enjoy most and least?
Why do you want to be a forward deployed engineer at Databricks?
Write a SQL query returning users who have more than one transaction.
Mini decomposition: how would you frame an architecture problem, what would you optimize for, and which layer would you design first?
At a high level, how would you build a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflow?
In a notebook, write a function that turns a list of records into a per-user summary.
Candidate S3 confirms a practical notebook problem easier than typical LeetCode; exact prompt not disclosed.
You have a city's traffic data. Build a system that improves traffic congestion there.
A second candidate (S4) reports the same prompt framed around New York City.
Given access to a client's raw data, design the pipeline and application layer that move a specific business KPI.
Tell me about a client-facing experience.
Tell me about something you owned end to end.
Tell me about a time you had to move very fast or make a decision quickly.
How would you forecast demand for a new product that has no historical data?
Netherlands onsite, October 2026; round not visible in the free preview.
Implement a simple API from a spec, then explain behavior on invalid input; extend it with persistence and concurrent callers.
Find and fix why a provided piece of code fails.
Spark executors crash with out-of-memory errors during a join. How do you fix it?
Progressive design: build a medallion (bronze/silver/gold) architecture, add an ML pipeline, move batch to streaming, then add multi-cloud governance.
Design an AI search and Q&A solution over a customer's internal documents.
When would you fine-tune a model rather than improve context and prompts?
A model looks fine on offline metrics but misbehaves or drifts in production. How do you find out why?
A customer asks for something you believe is a bad idea. What do you do?
Tell me about a time you pushed back on a customer to protect the outcome.
Plan a product in your own domain with interviewers, then build it alone in about two hours using any AI tools.
Sierra's examples: an AI game meant to keep the player in flow; a headless simulation tool driven by an agent
Demo what you built; defend product flows, walk through the code, describe the path to production and how you used AI.
Review a teammate's draft PR adding a cross-cutting feature to a medium-sized codebase, then improve it with coding agents.
Described as a pilot; AI policy for this round was still undecided
Detect circular references between spreadsheet cells that reference other cells.
Also listed on S5; S3 says reported by candidates
Build a customer-support AI agent for a fictional client; which two features would you prioritize and why?
What metrics and observability would you add to your agent once it runs in production?
Design an agentic service for a use case such as a subscription-cancellation flow.
Find and fix the bugs in a prewritten TypeScript/React app and explain how each one affects customers.
Present a technical topic of your choosing to a non-technical audience.
Python code throws intermittently; add exponential-backoff retries so it keeps trying until it succeeds.
Given a nested merchandise catalog, find every item related to item A, then items related to those children.
Candidate felt BFS/DFS would have been stronger than nested loops
Using a user-journey flowchart, CLI output, and code, find the bugs and explain how each hurts the customer.
Candidate found about four bugs before time ran out
How do you use AI yourself, and where does AI apply in customer support?
Design an AI agent for a streaming service, going beyond obvious support and recommendation use cases.
Interviewer pushed back that Sierra already does the conventional ideas; also listed on S5
Why do you want to work at Sierra, and how do you keep up with AI news?
Explain how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) works.
Page does not mark individual questions as candidate-reported
Describe your approach to prompt engineering.
Explain a technical concept to a non-technical person.
Tell me about handling conflicting stakeholder priorities and getting alignment.
Build a semantic search system over Amazon product data that ChatGPT can query; ship code and a working app, then present the design.
For the take-home: what is the use case, and how specific should search results be for different customer intents?
Where in your design did you choose one path over another, and why?
Solve a multi-step delivery-rate calculation problem, then state its time complexity and memory efficiency.
Candidate rated it easy; AI-enabled per the candidate
Implement a credit system where credits follow different expiration and usage rules.
Listed by Aced as reported; no individual candidate link
Refactor deeply nested code to support new requirements while keeping an existing test suite passing.
Simulate infection spread across a 2D grid in stages, passing tests at each stage.
Design the retrieval layer, including chunking and indexing, for a customer's private knowledge base.
Design an end-to-end batching system for LLM requests, balancing latency against cost.
Your LLM traffic grows 10x overnight; how do you stay inside latency and cost targets?
What evaluation would catch failures before the customer sees them?
Present a challenging system you built; defend the key design decision, its trade-offs, and how you evaluated it.
Why forward deployed engineering instead of a core product team?
Question-bank entry, not individually attributed
Tell me about explaining a complex technical concept to a non-technical customer or stakeholder.
Describe a disagreement with a customer or teammate and how it was resolved.
Tell me about your background and what you want in your next role.
Why forward deployed engineering?
What experience do you have with agentic development?
Set up the product (Devin) and run through a sample workflow.
Build an event-driven automation with the Devin API that solves an engineering-workflow problem.
Candidate says the task is large and the deadline tight.
Using Devin's integrations, build an autonomous vulnerability-remediation system for a configured GitHub project.
Walk me through a technical feature you have led.
Walk us through a project you owned and why it mattered to the business; why that approach or tool?
Guide attributes these to recent candidates and a Cognition interviewer.
Explain this project to someone with no technical background.
Your largest customer pushes for a feature not on your roadmap. What do you do?
Tell me about the most complex project you have led.
How do you handle a stakeholder who knows the subject as well as you do?
Build an automation engine (onsite), followed by pair programming.
Exact spec not disclosed.
What do you know about Cognition?
Why Anthropic? (written application answer, typically 200-400 words)
Tell me about yourself, why Anthropic, and why this role.
Implement an LRU cache, then extend it as new constraints arrive in later stages.
Convert sampled stack data into execution traces of function calls.
Read a set of files and remove duplicates.
Walk through your most significant project and justify its key technical decisions.
Why did you use ML or an LLM for that problem, and how did you know it fit?
How did adoption go, and how long until the solution was production-ready?
Design an API that lets users sample from large models, then design batch optimisation for it.
Described prompt, not verbatim
Handle security and compliance for a Claude deployment at a regulated customer such as a government contractor.
Described prompt, not verbatim
Role-played buyer: convince me Claude does something ChatGPT cannot.
Vendor blog; cites candidate reports only generically
Describe an unusual belief you hold and how you have defended it.
Daniela Amodei's description of the culture test, via Bloomberg summary
A client says the data quality Scale supplies has dropped over the past month. Diagnose it, using live SQL.
Why did you leave your last role?
Why do you want to work at Scale AI?
Given several parties' time intervals, find the periods where none of them overlap.
Guide attributes to one reported candidate experience
Using room-booking data, work out which rooms are free and when.
Attributed to candidate reports
Merge adjacent segments sharing the same modifiers, then toggle a modifier over a start-to-end range.
Attributed to candidate reports
Simulate a four-player card game from a PDF specification.
Attributed to a candidate report
Explain why the system returns no model output; root cause sat in prompt-hashing logic several layers down.
Attributed to one reported round
Design a claims-processing backend with retrieval and token-cost control.
Attributed to candidate reports
Design an enterprise RAG system under privacy and latency constraints.
Attributed to candidate reports
Describe your hardest project, and how you handled ambiguous requirements.
Attributed to candidate reports
Review a messy hypothetical Python pull request and fix it with comments (naming, typos, async syntax, Mistral API usage).
Refactor a piece of Python code; discuss sync versus async.
Pair-program a retrieval flow: call a third-party search API and feed results into a Mistral API call as context.
Candidate was rejected on API skills
Explain what RAG is.
A 2,000-page PDF exceeds the context window: fine-tune a model or build RAG? Justify.
For a chatbot covering a broad domain, compare RAG and fine-tuning trade-offs.
Explain LoRA fine-tuning.
What is a KV cache?
Describe your experience deploying ML systems.
LLM quiz going deep on retrieval, embeddings, and KV caching.
LeetCode-medium style coding problem.
How do you start designing a go-to-market strategy?
Also reported for Growth Strategist live round (S5)
How would you describe Clay to a potential customer?
What mistakes have you made, and how did you address them?
Unpaid take-home: build something in Clay and present it; learn the platform first if you are new to it.
Scoring criteria unclear to the candidate
Submit a Clay-built dataset, kickoff deck, and Loom; then run live discovery and a Clay demo for a mock enterprise customer.
Tell me about a time you used data to make an informed decision.
Guide labels it a reported question
Rate yourself out of 10 and justify the score.
Show your creativity using the Clay platform.
Why Clay, and have you used our software?
Tell me about yourself, and why Anduril?
Year approximate: report says interview ~3 years before a 2026 submission
Sort a binary array in linear time.
A grid search coding problem.
Only the title 'Grid Search' is given
Walk through your past projects.
Explain the difference between UDP and TCP.
Date on page (Jan 2021) may be a placeholder
What is especially hard in your current role, and how did you make it easier over time?
Give a presentation on why Anduril should hire you.
Role is not confirmed as forward deployed
Which project are you proudest of, and what did you personally build?
Why are you motivated by this kind of role?
Folders grant or deny users and groups; write functions checking a user's file access, then handle inheritance and conflicting changes over time.
An airline CTO says staff reschedule manually when planes break or schedules change. What would you do?
Why ElevenLabs, and how do you view the customer-facing side of the job?
How does a forward deployed engineer differ from a solutions architect, and what does an FDE own?
Tell me about the most complex project you have led.
Why Baseten, and why a forward deployed role?
Walk through how you would structure and test this service; what tradeoffs are you making and why?
Design an inference service for a customer with strict latency and cost requirements.
How would you monitor and evaluate model quality in production?
Tell me about turning a vague objective into a clear plan and shipping it.
Describe a project you owned end to end.
Design an AI feature that turns raw conversation data into actionable insights.
From a generic PM guide; not confirmed for Agent PM
How would you talk through a data model or API design with an engineer?
Generic PM guide
How would you define success and adoption for a feature you shipped?
Generic PM guide
Given a passage and per-position relevance scores, return the most relevant contiguous substring.
Same problem reported in 2024 (S4); output was left undefined, so clarify it
Build a React component that displays data and lets the user edit it.
In one day, build and deploy an app from scratch to a given set of requirements.
Type is a full build exercise; AI use not mentioned
Act as if on a first client call: scope a new project to get an AI system into production, covering architecture and decisions.
Employer describes the format, not the exact prompt; chosen so ChatGPT is of limited help. Fractional AI loop as of May 2024.
Undisclosed hands-on coding problem completed live; ChatGPT allowed, Copilot not; graded on clean code, judgment and LLM use.
Two such prompts; actual problems not published.
Platform topics to expect: Apex triggers, governor limits, SOQL/SOSL, integrations and asynchronous Apex.
Listed as likely focus areas by a blogger, not reported as asked questions.
Agentforce topics to expect: prompt engineering, compliance (HIPAA/SOX) and agent rollout strategy.
Prep advice, not a reported question.
How have you integrated Cohere in past work, and which components did you use?
Single report; candidate called the process disorganised
Show how you think about, design and use AI to drive impact in your role, referencing tools and workflows you use today.
Review or debug a piece of realistic, imperfect code and critique it.
Guide says several candidate accounts mention this; not tied to FDE roles