By FDE Interview Prep, a SourceStrongAI company

In this post12 sections
  1. What the hiring manager is deciding
  2. What hiring leaders say they ask about
  3. Where the round sits in the loops candidates describe
  4. The four probes, and where to practice each
  5. Probe one: what you owned and why you chose it
  6. Probe two: a vague customer problem in your first week
  7. Probe three: a custom build or a product change
  8. Probe four: what your last customer would say
  9. An evening’s prep for the round
  10. Questions people ask
  11. Keep reading
  12. More from the blog

You have a hiring manager round on your calendar, and no one will tell you whether it is a chat or another technical test. One candidate reported, in September 2026, an Anthropic Applied AI hiring-manager round that was mostly background questions Source 1Anthropic Applied AI interviewsPublisherBlindSource typecandidate report on Blind; another reported, in December 2025, a Palantir one of 30 minutes behavioral and 30 minutes technical Source 2Palantir FDSE Full Interview Loop Process (post by u/Not_the_Sauron)PublisherReddit r/csMajorsSource typecandidate report on Reddit. What hiring leaders say they look for is steadier: Ramp’s Director of Engineering asks about your career decisions and what you were responsible for Source 3Leo Mehr - Ramp's $44B Bet on Services (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherBasil Chatha, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview. We prepare the hiring manager interview as four probes: what you owned, a vague customer problem, custom build versus product change, and what your last customer would say. Bring evidence for each, not a pitch. This post goes deep on that one round; for the whole loop, start with the FDE interview guide.

What the hiring manager is deciding

Whether it comes first or last, the round asks something the technical rounds do not: will you make good calls when no one is there to check them?

In the job, you will often hear the request before your manager does, and decide what to build first and when to say no. That is why we prepare this round around three things:

  • Judgment you can show. Real decisions, with the alternative you turned down.
  • Ownership you can prove. What would have gone differently without you.
  • Candor. Whether you will tell them, and the customer, when something is going wrong.

In our view, strong technical rounds plus vague answers here read as someone who needs supervision.

What hiring leaders say they ask about

Leo Mehr, Director of Engineering at Ramp, said on a podcast published in July 2026 that he has up-weighted drive and high ownership in hiring, and that he assesses them by asking about career decisions, what someone was responsible for, how much responsibility they took on and how quickly they grew. Source 3Leo Mehr - Ramp's $44B Bet on Services (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherBasil Chatha, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview His August 2025 post on Ramp’s engineering blog says that in recruiting FDEs, what matters most is drive, communication and the will to solve customer problems end to end, not technical perfection. Source 4Forward Deployed Engineering (Leo Mehr, Director, Engineering)PublisherRamp Builders (engineering blog)Source typecompany blog

Palantir’s hiring-manager video is aimed at software engineers, not FDEs, but it is a clear statement of what a hiring manager wants to see. In that July 2025 video, a Foundry hiring manager said showing how you think through problems is as important as reaching a good final outcome. Source 5From Code to Career: Meet Palantir's Hiring Managers (YouTube uploaded English captions)PublisherPalantir, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview Another told candidates not to give a prepared statement of what they think Palantir wants to hear, and to “be real in the interview process”. Source 5From Code to Career: Meet Palantir's Hiring Managers (YouTube uploaded English captions)PublisherPalantir, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview

Then there is the failure pattern. On a South Park Commons panel in May 2026, Colin Jarvis of OpenAI described people who come to love the form of what they built more than its function, and said the best FDEs will tear a solution up and build something completely different when users do not use it. Source 6The Future of Forward Deployed Engineering | OpenAI, Ramp, Nominal, DatalandPublisherSouth Park Commons (YouTube)Source typerecorded talk or interview He was describing the job, not an interview, but in our prep it is the answer to avoid: the engineer who defends what they built instead of the outcome the customer needed.

Read together, these point one way. Tell the story of your decisions, think out loud, and show you care more about what worked than about what you made.

Where the round sits in the loops candidates describe

No employer we checked publishes how the round is scored, and formats vary. A few data points:

  • Cohere’s careers page lists a hiring-manager meeting before a final round with a few team members. Source 7Careers | CoherePublisherCohereSource typecompany hiring page
  • One poster wrote, in December 2025, that the second round for Salesforce’s Agentforce Forward Deployed Engineer role was with a hiring manager and was “straightforward”. Source 8Agentforce Forward Deployed Engineer Interview (post by u/Helpful-Regret-1550)PublisherReddit r/SalesforceCareersSource typecandidate report on Reddit
  • Palantir’s early-talent recruiting timeline describes a meeting with a hiring manager that is customized based on your onsite feedback. Source 9Students | Palantir Careers (timeline image: RecruitingTimeline_V3.jpg)PublisherPalantirSource typecompany hiring page
  • One candidate reported on Reddit, in December 2025, that their Government-track Palantir FDSE loop ended with a hiring-manager round of 30 minutes behavioral and 30 minutes technical, and wrote that the rejection that followed “was not about technical ability but mission alignment.” Source 2Palantir FDSE Full Interview Loop Process (post by u/Not_the_Sauron)PublisherReddit r/csMajorsSource typecandidate report on Reddit
  • In a Reddit thread about Palantir’s FDSE interview, a commenter who did not name the company or the role described, in May 2026, a hiring-manager round of a “generic convo” plus one of the technical round types. Source 10Palantir FDSE Technical Interview (comment by u/MShakeed)PublisherReddit r/csMajorsSource typecandidate report on Reddit
  • One candidate interviewing for an FDE role at Databricks wrote, in September 2026, that the hiring manager round “had a lot of open-ended questions to check the technical depth”, such as “tell me about a time you solved a difficult technical problem”. Source 11FDE interview at Databricks (post by u/LongjumpingBit6900)PublisherReddit r/leetcodeSource typecandidate report on RedditSource 12FDE interview at Databricks (comment by u/LongjumpingBit6900)PublisherReddit r/leetcodeSource typecandidate report on Reddit
  • On Blind, one candidate interviewing for an Anthropic Applied AI role wrote, in September 2026, that their hiring-manager round was “easy” and “not much apart from background questions.” Source 1Anthropic Applied AI interviewsPublisherBlindSource typecandidate report on Blind

Two lessons follow. First, be ready for some technical work even in a round labeled as a conversation; some candidates report it and some do not. Second, if an earlier round went badly, prepare to revisit it: Palantir says it shapes this meeting for early-talent candidates from onsite feedback. Source 9Students | Palantir Careers (timeline image: RecruitingTimeline_V3.jpg)PublisherPalantirSource typecompany hiring page

The four probes, and where to practice each

The probes below are how we organize prep for this round. They are our method, not any employer’s rubric. Each maps to a question in our bank, so you can practice the exact shape.

ProbePractice question
What you ownedWhich decisions were yours alone? (free)
A vague first weekFirst week with a vague problem
Custom or productCustom build or product change?
Customer viewWhat would your last customer say?

The first is free, with its model answer; the other three are in Pro.

Probe one: what you owned and why you chose it

This is the Mehr probe: your career as a series of decisions. Expect “walk me through your career”, “tell me about a time you solved a difficult technical problem” (the question the Databricks candidate above quoted) or “describe your current role in depth”, then follow-ups that pull on each move.

Answer structure.

  1. For each move, give the reason. “I left the platform team because I wanted to be closer to the people using what I built.” One sentence per move, and the reasons should add up to this job.
  2. Pick one project by its decisions, not its size. Name a call you made against a reasonable alternative someone else was pushing.
  3. Say what would have been different without you. It is the easiest part to skip, and the part the hiring manager is listening for.
  4. Name a decision that turned out wrong, and what you changed.

Words that work. “Two calls on that project were mine. I chose to ship the import tool before the dashboard, over my lead’s objection, because the ops team couldn’t start without clean data. And I cut the approval workflow from the first release. The first was right. The second cost us a month of rework, and here is what I would do instead.”

The common mistake is “we” all the way through, so there is nothing to credit to you. The fix is an audit before the interview: go through your story line by line and mark each verb as yours, the team’s or someone else’s. The ownership audit walks through it, and the project deep dive post covers the follow-ups that come after.

To practice for free, answer which decisions were yours alone out loud and time yourself. Then, in Pro, try describe your current role in depth, which tests whether you can explain your own work to an outsider. For the career thread, the free bridge story lesson shows how to connect past work to the FDE job in two minutes.

Probe two: a vague customer problem in your first week

This probe tests how you start. Shilpa Balaji, a former FDE recruitment lead at Palantir, told First Round Review that Palantir FDE hiring managers would present a customer problem no one had been able to solve and ask the candidate how they would solve it. Source 13So You Want to Hire a Forward Deployed EngineerPublisherFirst Round ReviewSource typenews report

The trap is answering the problem as stated. Colin Jarvis, then OpenAI’s head of forward deployed engineering, was quoted by The Pragmatic Engineer, in August 2025, as saying that what customers describe in scoping often does not match the data and system reality on the ground. Source 14What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (Gergely Orosz)PublisherThe Pragmatic EngineerSource typenews report Your answer has to show you would find that gap early.

Answer structure: a week you could put on a calendar.

  1. Day one. Turn the request into a decision the sponsor wants to make, and ask what number would tell them it worked. Request data access now, since it runs on someone else’s schedule.
  2. Days two and three. Meet the people who do the work, not just the sponsor, and watch them do it.
  3. Day four. Measure the baseline yourself from their records.
  4. Day five. Ship something small on real data, plus a one-page problem statement that says what you are not doing.

Words that work. “The sponsor said ‘claims take too long’. By Wednesday I’d found that simple claims were fast and the delay was all in the ones that needed a site visit. So my Friday write-up changed the goal, and I said so to the sponsor before I built anything.”

A real prompt, worked through. Balaji told First Round Review of one example: candidates had insider trading explained to them and were asked what data they would need, what they would ask the customer and what they would look for. Source 13So You Want to Hire a Forward Deployed EngineerPublisherFirst Round ReviewSource typenews report

  • Weak: jumps straight to an anomaly-detection model.
  • Ask the customer: who counts as an insider here, who reviews alerts today, and what did the last missed case look like?
  • Data: trade records with account and time, the list of insiders and their accounts, and the dates of announcements.
  • What to look for: trades by insider-linked accounts shortly before announcements, or trades unusually large for that account.
  • Ship first: a list that one reviewer can check by hand.

Practice it with the first-week question. To rehearse scoping live, the free practice case is a 10-minute run against an AI customer who only tells you what you ask about, scored with quotes from your own answers; sign in to start.

Probe three: a custom build or a product change

This is the judgment probe, and it is where the form-over-function failure shows up. An FDE team has to decide when one customer’s request becomes custom code and when it becomes a product change. Vinoo Ganesh, who led Palantir’s rotation that turned software engineers into FDEs, wrote in Latent Space, in September 2026, that the engineers who mattered weren’t the ones who shipped the most for customers but the ones who came back and changed what was built. Source 15The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job RightPublisherLatent SpaceSource typenews report

It also tests whether you can say no. Mehr’s Ramp blog post says FDEs must be able to give an enthusiastic yes to rational customer requests while pushing back against unreasonable ones. Source 4Forward Deployed Engineering (Leo Mehr, Director, Engineering)PublisherRamp Builders (engineering blog)Source typecompany blog In a talk published in July 2026, he said that when a sales rep urgently demands an integration, a well-trained FDE pauses to ask what is driving the urgency, who will use it and whether every workaround has been tried. Source 16How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Ramp — Leo Mehr (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherAI Engineer, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview

Answer structure: criteria first, then the call.

  1. Who else needs it. Name the other customers, from tickets and other deployments.
  2. How urgent it is here. What breaks, and by when.
  3. What custom costs to keep alive. Who owns it after you leave.
  4. Where the product is going. Ask the product manager rather than guessing.

Then say how the answers decide it, and what would make you move a custom build into the product later.

Words that work. “Only this customer needs it, and their month-end close breaks without it, so I’d build it on the product’s plugin layer rather than fork the core, time-boxed to two weeks, with their admin named as owner after I leave. I checked with the PM: it isn’t on the roadmap. If a second customer asks, I take both requests to the product team with the usage data.”

The common mistake is an identity instead of a method: “I’m always customer first.” It tells the hiring manager nothing about your next call. The other mistake is a story in which you defended your build long after users stopped using it. If you have that story, tell it as the failure it was and say what you’d do now. Practice with the custom build question.

Probe four: what your last customer would say

This probe tests candor. A 2020 post on Palantir’s blog quotes a hiring manager saying Palantir asks about your failures, mistakes and struggles, and wants an actual failure rather than a success story. Source 17Interviewing at Palantir: Advice from PalantiriansPublisherPalantir BlogSource typecompany blog “What would your last customer say?” is the customer-facing version of that question.

Answer structure.

  1. Place the person. Their role, the kind of organization and what you delivered. Take the last customer, as asked, not your favorite.
  2. What they’d say you did well, in their words, with the episode that earned it.
  3. What they’d say you missed, also in their words. It must be real and have cost them something.
  4. What you changed, and a later time the new habit showed up.
  5. Where the relationship stands now.

Words that work. “She’d say I told her about problems before her team found them. She’d also say I let the pilot run past the date I gave her and told her too late to warn her own boss. Now I send a date-risk note the day I see slippage, not the day before.”

The common mistake is the flattering miss: “they’d say I cared too much.” It signals that you won’t name a real one, which is the opposite of what this probe checks. Keep both halves about the same length. Practice with the last customer question.

An evening’s prep for the round

Do these in order, and say each answer out loud before the round.

Before the hiring manager round

  • Write one sentence per career move saying why you made it.
  • Pick two projects by their decisions, and mark every verb in each story as yours or the team’s.
  • Draft a first-week plan for a vague problem from your own field, day by day.
  • Write your criteria for custom build versus product change, and one story where you made the call.
  • Write what your last customer would say, good and bad, in their words.
  • Prepare one real failure, with what you changed afterward.
  • Say each answer out loud once, and cut anything that sounds like a prepared statement.
  • Prepare your questions for the end of the round.

For that last item, our post on questions to ask lists ones that tell you what the job is. If you want the wider view of what hiring leaders say they look for, the lesson on what hiring leaders say maps each trait to a round, and the double bar lesson explains why an FDE has to clear a bar for trust as well as skill.

Answer which decisions were yours alone out loud tonight; it is free. Pro opens the other questions in this post, each with a model answer, and every question in the bank 180, with a 7-day free trial. See Pro.

GlossaryForward deployed software engineerPalantir’s title for its FDE role, called Delta internally; OpenAI and EY also post FDSE titles, each with its own duties.More on Forward deployed software engineerGlossaryForward deployed engineerA software engineer who builds and ships production systems inside a customer’s problem and environment, accountable to that customer’s outcome.More on Forward deployed engineer

Questions people ask

What does an FDE hiring manager interview focus on?

Expect questions about what you owned, why you made your career decisions and how you think through a problem. Ramp’s Director of Engineering has said he asks candidates about their career decisions and what they were responsible for, and, in a Palantir video aimed at software engineers, a hiring manager said showing how you think through problems is as important as reaching a good final outcome.Source 3Leo Mehr - Ramp's $44B Bet on Services (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherBasil Chatha, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interviewSource 5From Code to Career: Meet Palantir's Hiring Managers (YouTube uploaded English captions)PublisherPalantir, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview

Do candidates report technical questions in the hiring manager round?

Some report one and some do not. One candidate reported, in December 2025, a Palantir FDSE hiring-manager round of 30 minutes behavioral and 30 minutes technical, and one candidate interviewing for an FDE role at Databricks wrote, in September 2026, that the round had open-ended questions to check technical depth, while one candidate reported on Blind, in September 2026, an Anthropic Applied AI hiring-manager round that was mostly background questions. Prepare for both.Source 1Anthropic Applied AI interviewsPublisherBlindSource typecandidate report on BlindSource 2Palantir FDSE Full Interview Loop Process (post by u/Not_the_Sauron)PublisherReddit r/csMajorsSource typecandidate report on RedditSource 11FDE interview at Databricks (post by u/LongjumpingBit6900)PublisherReddit r/leetcodeSource typecandidate report on RedditSource 12FDE interview at Databricks (comment by u/LongjumpingBit6900)PublisherReddit r/leetcodeSource typecandidate report on Reddit

Does the hiring manager round depend on how my earlier rounds went?

At Palantir, for early-talent candidates, it says so. Its published timeline describes a hiring manager meeting customized based on your onsite feedback. Other employers do not publish this, so be ready to revisit any round you felt was weak.Source 9Students | Palantir Careers (timeline image: RecruitingTimeline_V3.jpg)PublisherPalantirSource typecompany hiring page

Should I prepare a polished pitch for the hiring manager?

Prepare evidence, not a script. In a video aimed at software engineering candidates, a Palantir hiring manager said not to give a prepared statement of what you think Palantir wants to hear, and to be real in the interview.Source 5From Code to Career: Meet Palantir's Hiring Managers (YouTube uploaded English captions)PublisherPalantir, YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview

Keep reading

Guides

Lessons

Questions

More in Interview rounds, page 4