How to prepare for an FDE interview

By roundWhat to prepare

1. Case round

   Turn a vague customer request into one goal you can measure. Ask about the work and the data before you draw anything.

   • A customer says “we want AI in our claims process.” What do you ask in the first meeting?
   • How do you decide what to build first when a customer wants ten things?
   • A delivery company is losing money and hands you six months of order data. Where do you look first?

   All questions: Discovery and scoping

2. Coding

   Practical problems in stages: messy data, an API with limits, a bug in code you didn't write. Python comes up most.

   • Here's a CSV export from a customer. Write a script that cleans it and loads it into our API.
   • Fetch every record from a paginated API that rate-limits you and sometimes fails.
   • You get a codebase you've never seen and one hour to fix a bug. Where do you start?
   • The customer is on the call. Their integration is failing on live data, you've never seen their system, and they want it working before the call ends. What do you do?

   All questions: CodingAll questions: Integrations and APIs

3. System or AI design

   Design for one real customer: their data, their cloud, their permissions, and how you'd know it works.

   • A customer wants a chatbot over their internal documents. How do you build it?
   • How do you know an LLM feature is good enough to ship?
   • A bank wants our product inside their own cloud account, with no data leaving it. How do you approach it?
   • How would you design a daily pipeline that feeds customer data into our product?

   All questions: LLMs, RAG and agentsAll questions: Cloud, deployment and securityAll questions: Data and SQL

4. Behavioral and hiring manager

   Stories where your own part is clear: a customer win, a pushback, a failure, changing requirements, something you owned end to end.

   • Why FDE and not a regular software engineering role?
   • Describe a time you had to tell a customer bad news.
   • Tell me about something you shipped that broke in production.

   All questions: Ownership and working with customers