A practice prompt we wrote. No company or candidate report names it, so it carries no company tag.
How to answer
The question is about the customer’s world: claims adjudication, freight tendering, pharmacy benefits. The Engineering Leadership newsletter reported, in August 2026, that Colin Jarvis, whom it described as OpenAI’s Global Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, said OpenAI ideally wants FDEs with domain expertise in the customer’s field, and wants to mix in FDEs who are not experts, because someone who brings experience from another industry is more likely to challenge the status quo. Source 1Inside OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineer RolePublisherEngineering Leadership (Gregor Ojstersek)Source typenews report Your story shows you can be that outsider: useful quickly, and able to see what insiders had stopped questioning.
- The gap and the deadline. What you didn’t know, and what you had to deliver by when.
- What “useful” meant. The first decision or question you had to answer; it scoped what you learned and skipped.
- Your sources, by name. The document that mattered (a regulation, a rate sheet, their procedures) and the person who did the work every day. Say what you did with each: a glossary they corrected, a shift you sat through, a data dictionary you wrote from their tables.
- The first contribution that proved it. Something small the experts accepted: a query that matched their month-end numbers, a rule they signed off, a bug you found because you now knew what a field meant. If being new showed you something the experts had stopped questioning, say how you raised it: as a question to the process owner, not a verdict.
- The edge of what you knew. What you got wrong early and who corrected you; then what you still left to the experts, and how you made sure.
Step four carries the answer; without it you have listed activities, not shown they worked. The trap in step five: claiming expertise, which invites the domain question you cannot answer.
Follow-ups
What the interviewer may ask next, once your first answer is on the table.
- What did you get wrong early on, and who corrected you?
- Who did you lean on most, and what did they get from helping you?
- What in that domain would you still not trust yourself to decide alone?
Where answers go wrong
- Describes effort instead of method (“I read everything and asked a lot of questions”) and names no source, no person and no contribution, so nothing shows the learning worked.
- Claims to have become an expert, which invites a domain question the story cannot survive, instead of naming what they learned well enough to act on and what they left to others.
Answer this in two minutes
Write the answer you would say out loud. The clock starts with your first word.
Illustrative answer about a fictional project
I was an engineer at a company that builds data integrations for operations teams. A regional airline’s maintenance planning group signed with us, and I had two weeks to deliver the first piece: a daily list of maintenance tasks coming due across their 38 aircraft in the next 30 days, pulled from their maintenance tracking system.