Describe your current role in depth: what you own, how your team is organized and how your work reaches customers.

How to answer

This question sounds like small talk and is not. One candidate’s report on Aced (formerly Exponent) for a Cognition FDE role, dated September 2026, says interviewers expect you to deeply unpack your responsibilities in current or former roles, including how your organization functions and how different teams interact. ^[1]Source 1Cognition AI Forward Deployed Engineer Interview ExperiencePublisherAced (formerly Exponent)Source typecandidate’s personal write-up Answer it like a system diagram with you inside it.

Give it in five parts, in this order.

1. The role in one sentence, in plain words, not your title: “I’m the engineer who builds and runs integrations for our five largest customers.”
2. The org around you. Who you report to, who sits beside you, and the teams you depend on or hand work to. Name roles, not people. Say who decides your priorities.
3. What you own, sorted. What you own outright, meaning you decide and you get paged; what you share, and with whom; and what you touch but don’t own. That last category is what makes the first believable.
4. How your work reaches a customer. Trace one real change from the request to the customer’s outcome, naming each hand-off: who asked, who scoped it, what you built, who shipped it, how the customer knew. End with a number measured on their side.
5. The gap, in one sentence. What this role doesn’t give you that the one you’re interviewing for would. It answers “why are you looking” before they ask.

Keep the first pass to about three minutes, since they asked for depth, then let them pick where to dig. Prepare one layer deeper on each part: the decision you made that someone else would have made differently, and the hand-off that most often goes wrong.

The trap is the job description: all duties, no decisions, no customer.