A practice prompt we wrote. No company or candidate report names it, so it carries no company tag.
How to answer
Show that you learn before you build, and still ship within the month. The Pragmatic Engineer reported, in August 2025, that OpenAI’s Head of described customer projects in three phases: early scoping with a couple of days on site, validation against agreed criteria including evals, and then delivery. Source 1What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (Gergely Orosz)PublisherThe Pragmatic EngineerSource typenews report As of September 2026, Cursor’s FDE postings say FDEs ship a first version in days, then harden it over weeks with rollout plans and monitoring. Source 2Forward Deployed EngineerPublisherCursor (Ashby job board)Source typecompany job board
Give the month in phases, each ending in something visible.
- Before day one: read what was sold. Read the contract, the account team’s notes, and what sales promised to whom. The gap between that and what’s possible is the first risk you own.
- Week one: people, success and access. Meet the sponsor, the daily users and the customer’s engineers. Write the sponsor’s definition of success in their words; read it back. Request system and data access on day one; it’s the slowest item. If it slips past week one, build on a schema export or a sample from the customer’s engineer, and have the sponsor chase it.
- Week two: the work as it happens. Sit with users, trace one real record end to end, and agree the first slice with the sponsor: small, real data, a real user.
- Weeks three and four: ship and show. Put the slice in users’ hands and demo it in the customer’s own meeting, not yours. End with a one-page plan for the next two months.
Name the relationship steps: a written weekly update to the sponsor, the customer engineer who will own this after you, and an early meeting with security or IT, who can block everything.
The trap is a plan that is all process. Say what a user will be doing differently by day 30, and who will notice.
Follow-ups
What the interviewer may ask next, once your first answer is on the table.
- It’s the end of week two and you still don’t have access to their data. What do you do?
- What would you have shipped by day 30, and who would have used it?
- How would the customer’s sponsor describe your first month to their boss?
Where answers go wrong
- A month of “listening and learning” with nothing in a user’s hands, so the customer’s first impression of you is meetings.
- Starting to build in week one, before anyone has said in their own words what success looks like, and shipping a fast answer to the wrong question.
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’d run it in four phases, and each ends with something the customer can see. It’s the plan I used the last time I was placed with a new customer: I was the deployed engineer for a route-planning product, placed with a regional waste-hauling company.