Where it comes from

How to answer

At some companies this question sorts you into a role. Leo Mehr, Director of Engineering at Ramp, said on dearCC in June 2026 that asking candidates what they are excited about and most interested in is one way Ramp decides whether someone is better suited to or another engineering role. Source 1What is a Forward Deployed Engineer? (FDE Explained) feat. Leo Mehr of Ramp (YouTube auto-generated English captions)PublisherdearCC (Clara Shih), YouTubeSource typerecorded talk or interview So the answer places you, and the interviewer hears the category before the detail.

  1. Name a problem, not a technology. “Getting people to trust an automated decision enough to stop checking it by hand” is a problem. “Agents” is a technology, and it sounds like a product or research role.
  2. Show where it came from. The last time you worked on it: the customer, what you built, what changed. One story, and it should match your resume.
  3. Say why it has to be solved at the customer. This is the sentence that places you in FDE. The cause sits in one customer’s data, workflow and people, so it has to be found there, even when the fix later ships to everyone.
  4. Put it in their customer base. One line on where it shows up in the customers their posting names.
  5. Say what two years should add. A skill you want by the end, such as doing it across industries, not a title.

Keep it to about a minute. The follow-ups test whether the excitement survives the unglamorous work, so have an answer ready for a first year that is mostly data plumbing and permissions.

The trap is naming the newest technology in the field. It tells the recruiter what you want to use, not what you want to fix, and “what you want to fix” is the part that decides the role. The bridge story shows how to find the problem in your own history.

GlossaryForward 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

Follow-ups

What the interviewer may ask next, once your first answer is on the table.

  • What if the first year were mostly data plumbing and permissions, and very little of the part you just described?
  • That sounds like a product or applied ML problem. Why does it need someone at the customer?
  • What have you already done about that problem in your current role?

Where answers go wrong

  • Names a technology (“agents”, “LLMs”) instead of a problem, which sounds like a research or product role, not a customer-facing one.
  • Picks a problem the resume shows no sign of, so the answer reads as fitted to the posting rather than drawn from their work.

Answer this in two minutes

Write the answer you would say out loud. The clock starts with your first word.

Two minutes

Illustrative answer about a fictional project

The problem I want to spend the next two years on is getting people to trust an automated decision enough to stop redoing it by hand. The model is rarely the hard part.

Learn this in Module 0: The FDE role, decoded, part of the curriculum.