Interview prep · interview drills
Forty-five minutes, one design round.
Each drill is the kind of prompt an interviewer gives in an FDE design round. Run the clock, take the curveballs as they come, score yourself against the rubric, then compare with a strong answer.
Hypothetical scenarios. Where a drill names a company, it uses only that company’s public product facts, dated and linked, and implies no affiliation or endorsement.
9 drills
- Drill 04Government ProCutting an unemployment-insurance call backlog after a mass layoffYou're the forward deployed engineer on an AI vendor's government team. A US state unemployment-insurance agency has just absorbed a mass layoff at a large regional employer. Initial claims have tripled, hold times on… 45 min No real companiesOpen
- Drill 05Healthcare ProPrior-authorisation requests that are complete on first submissionYou're the forward deployed engineer for an AI vendor. Your customer is a US health system: four hospitals and a large outpatient imaging and surgery business. Its prior-authorisation team sends thousands of requests a… 45 min No real companiesOpen
- Drill 06Legal ProPlaybook review of vendor contracts inside a law firm's wallsYou're the forward deployed engineer for a legal-AI vendor. A large US law firm's commercial group reviews hundreds of vendor contracts a month for its corporate clients: software subscriptions, data processing, outsourcing. Each client… 45 min No real companiesOpen
- Drill 07Financial services ProA dispute-analyst assistant for a card issuerYou're the forward deployed engineer for an AI vendor. A US card issuer, credit and debit, runs a dispute operation of a few hundred analysts. Volumes are up, investigation deadlines are tight, and quality… 45 min No real companiesOpen
- Drill 08Logistics & industrial ProTaking check calls off the dispatcher's deskYou're the forward deployed engineer for a voice-AI vendor, working with a US freight brokerage. Its dispatchers each own a book of truckload shipments and phone carriers several times per load: where is the… 45 min No real companiesOpen
- Drill 09AI coding & modernisation ProMoving a bank's fee batch off the mainframe without changing a centYou're the forward deployed engineer at a coding-agent vendor, placed with a US regional bank. Every night a COBOL batch job works out fees for about 2.1 million deposit accounts: monthly maintenance, overdraft and… 45 min No real companiesOpen
- Drill 10Customer experience & voice ProRefunds and cancellations within policyYou're the forward deployed engineer for a CX-agent vendor, working with a US subscription business. It sells monthly and annual plans online to about three million subscribers. Chat is its busiest support channel, and… 45 min No real companiesOpen
- Drill 11Every elective ProA support agent got worse after a model upgrade: find out why by FridayYou're the forward deployed engineer who helped deploy a customer-support agent at a US subscription software business. Last Tuesday the platform team moved the agent to a newer version of the same model. This… 45 min No real companiesOpen
- Drill 12Every elective ProFirst week: discovery with a sceptical operations managerThis round is a role-play. I'm the operations manager at a mid-size US distributor. My team handles order exceptions by hand: orders that fail checks and sit in a queue until someone fixes them.… 45 min No real companiesOpen