FDE Interview
Forward Deployed Engineer interview prep
Forward deployed engineers build software with customers, inside the customers' systems. Their interviews test that directly: framing a vague business problem, practical coding against real data and APIs, designing for a customer's environment, and handling customers. This section collects what we know from reported interviews, our guidance for each round, and 79 reviewed practice questions.
Round guides
5 rounds, each with a framework, a worked example, scoring and mistakes.
Practice questions
79 reviewed questions grouped by round, 4 free.
Companies
13 companies with FDE openings or FDE interview reports, plus 3 more whose questions match FDE work.
AI mock interviewer
Timed mock rounds on a real reported question, graded as you answer.
FDE jobs
575 open forward deployed roles on our jobs board.
What a forward deployed engineer does
An FDE is a software engineer assigned to customers rather than to a product area. The work is to make the product produce a real result for one customer: understand their problem and data, connect the product to their systems, write the code and workflows that are missing, get it into production, and bring the patterns that repeat back to the product team. The role is common at companies whose product is a platform that needs fitting to each customer, which today includes most companies selling AI systems to enterprises.
| Forward deployed engineer | Software engineer (product) | Solutions / sales engineer | ML engineer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Builds for | One customer at a time, inside their environment | Every user of the product | Prospects, before and during the sale | A model-backed product or platform |
| Ships | Production code, integrations and workflows that customers run | Product features | Demos, proofs of concept, technical answers | Models, training and serving systems |
| Time with customers | High: often on site, part of the account team | Low | High, mostly pre-sale | Low to medium |
| Judged on | Customer outcomes and what becomes reusable | Product quality and velocity | Deals won, technical win rate | Model quality and system performance |
| Interview emphasis | Decomposition, practical coding, deployment design, customer scenarios | Algorithms, system design, behavioral | Product knowledge, demo, communication | ML fundamentals, ML coding, ML system design |
Our summary of how the roles typically differ; individual companies draw the lines differently.
The FDE interview loop
We keep what candidates reported apart from what we infer. Public detail on FDE loops is thin, so the reported column is short on purpose.
Reported by candidates
What our data shows
Questions reported from FDE interviews:
- GPU Credit Ledger with Expiring Grants · OpenAI
- Deduplicate Files · Anthropic
- Convert Stack Samples to Trace Events · Anthropic
- Durable Key-Value Store Serialization · OpenAI
- Coding Q2 — File Deduplication · Anthropic
- LLM API Practical and Output Validation · Scale AI
- REST API: Country Codes · Palantir
- Design Semantic Product Search as a Tool for a Chat Assistant · OpenAI
- Design an Internal Tool That Matches Colleagues by Hobbies and Interests · Palantir
- Design a Factory Copilot: Visual Defect Inspection Plus Answers From Operating Procedures · Codincity
- Choose Checkout Coupons under a Loyalty-Point Budget to Maximize Savings · Palantir
- Validate Form and Append to Table · Amazon
- Design a Product That Helps Taxi Drivers Using Historical Trip Data · Palantir
- Grocery Checkout Coupons with Category Stacking and a Discount Cap · Palantir
- Design a Training Dataset That Lifts a Coding Agent on a Repository-Repair Benchmark · Labelbox
- Most Squares Covering One Grid Cell · Google
- Design a Way to Find Restaurants Quiet Enough to Talk at a Given Date and Time · Palantir
FDE interview experiences shared on our forum (summaries are public, full posts are for members):
- C3 AI Forward Deployed Engineer new grad virtual onsite (rejected) · C3 AI · November 2026
A new grad Forward Deployed Engineer interview process at C3 AI with several rounds, ending in a rejection. The post covers each round and what was asked, and there is more inside.
- Databricks Senior Forward Deployed Engineer recruiter screen (rejected) · Databricks · October 2026
A candidate for a senior Forward Deployed Engineer position at Databricks recounts a short recruiter phone call that ended in a rejection email. The post covers every question the recruiter asked and how the call felt.
- Palantir interview: Forward deployment engineer · Palantir · July 2026
applied online for the FDSE (Forward Deployed Software Engineer) role. About two weeks later, HR reached out and scheduled the first-round phone interview, which was around 30 minutes. I’d recommend preparing well for the first round because they seem to take it pretty seriously. The interviewer asked what I knew about Palantir, why I was interested in Palantir, and why I wanted to join the company. Basically, make sure you can explain your motivation clearly and show genuine enthusiasm.
That is all the FDE-specific reporting we hold: 17 questions and 3 forum experiences. It is not enough to describe any company's full FDE loop, so we do not.
Our inference (editorial)
The shape most loops follow
- Recruiter screen: background, motivation for FDE work, travel.
- Technical screen: practical coding, often with an API or a data file.
- Onsite or virtual onsite, usually four or five of: decomposition, practical coding, deployment system design, ai / llm applications, behavioral & customer.
- Some companies add a take-home or a presentation of a past project.
Inferred from the role's responsibilities and from the rounds reported for software and AI engineering loops at the same companies. Treat it as a planning aid, not as any company's official process.
Round guides
Decomposition
Turn a vague business ask into a scoped, buildable plan: the outcome, the data you really have, the first slice and how you will know it worked.
9 practice questions · framework · worked example
Practical coding
Working code against messy input: data wrangling, calling a paginated, rate-limited API, and debugging code you did not write.
28 practice questions · framework · worked example
Deployment system design
Design inside someone else's environment: their identity, network and systems of record. RAG and agents, data pipelines and integrations that survive real failures.
14 practice questions · framework · worked example
AI / LLM applications
Build something useful on a model API: structured outputs, retrieval, tools and agents, with an evaluation that proves it works and guardrails for when it does not.
19 practice questions · framework · worked example
Behavioral & customer
Stories about ownership and judgement, plus live role-plays: a failed demo, an unhappy sponsor, a request you have to turn down.
9 practice questions · framework · worked example
Practice questions by round
Reviewed by hand from our bank of reported questions (user uploads and 1Point3Acres posts). They fit FDE work, but only 17 were reported from an FDE loop as such; the rest come from software, ML and AI engineering loops, many at companies that hire FDEs. The first five of each round are below.
Decomposition
All 9 →Practical coding
All 28 →Deployment system design
All 14 →- OpenAIreported March 2026
- Sierrareported October 2026
- Perplexityreported July 2026
- Scale AIreported October 2026
- xAIreported July 2026
AI / LLM applications
All 19 →Companies hiring forward deployed engineers
Companies with FDE roles on our jobs board or FDE interview reports in our data. The number is reported questions.
Also covered for their questions that match FDE work (no FDE postings or reports found): xAI, Rippling, Sierra.
FAQ
- What does a forward deployed engineer do?
- A forward deployed engineer (FDE) is a software engineer who works directly with a customer to make a product deliver results in that customer's environment: scoping the problem, integrating with their systems, writing production code and workflows, and feeding what they learn back to the product team.
- Is FDE the same as FDSE or "deployment strategist"?
- Titles vary by company. Forward deployed software engineer (FDSE) and forward deployed engineer usually describe the same engineering role. Some companies pair it with a less technical deployment or strategy role that owns the customer relationship; read the job description for how much code the role writes.
- How is the FDE interview different from a software engineer interview?
- Expect fewer pure algorithm puzzles and more practical work: decomposing a vague customer problem, coding against messy data and APIs, designing a system inside a customer's constraints, and customer role-plays. The bar on code quality and communication is high.
- Do forward deployed engineers need machine learning?
- At AI companies, applied knowledge matters: building on model APIs, retrieval, agents and evaluation. Deep model training theory is rarely the focus. Our AI application round guide covers what is usually expected.
- How should I prepare in two weeks?
- Read the five round guides, then spend most of the time doing: two or three practical coding questions with APIs and data, two deployment design questions, a decomposition case out loud, and a prepared story bank for the behavioral round. Use the AI interviewer for timed mocks.