Anduril Forward Deployed Engineer interview questions

No data leaves, you cannot pre-inspect the corpus, and your toolchain arrives on a single USB. Design adaptation and evaluation when you will never observe a single input or output.

A 7B VLM at 25 FPS on an embedded GPU sounds impossible until you stop processing every frame fully. The answer is token pruning, frame-to-frame KV reuse, and a three-stage pipeline that hides latency.

The most common screen opener, and interviewers use it to check whether hashmap thinking is reflexive. Here's the one-pass answer, the narration that earns points, and the duplicate-handling edge case most candidates fumble.

Every queue, webhook, and retry loop you'll ever deploy at a customer hides this distinction. Interviewers use it to separate people who've shipped from people who've read about shipping.

The single most common FDE behavioral question, and the 'week one' follow-up is where most candidates collapse. Here's the structure that signals you can be dropped into chaos and produce order.

This is a flight-risk filter, not small talk, FDE teams lose hires back to pure SWE roles constantly. The answer that passes is built on evidence, not enthusiasm. Here's what it sounds like.

Every deployment has a skeptic, and 'I showed them data and they came around' is the answer everyone gives. The scored version starts with why they were right to be skeptical.

A staple at OpenAI and Anthropic in both coding and design rounds. Most candidates can name the algorithms; few can say which one lets 2x your limit through, and that's the part that gets scored.

The signature FDE debugging genre: a moving fault, an opaque client, and a customer who's sure it's your fault. The winning method splits the problem at the boundary, and knows the four classic culprits hiding on their side.

The NVIDIA warm-up that exposes whether you've written a kernel or just called .cuda(). The mapping from software hierarchy to silicon explains every GPU performance conversation that follows.

A Fermi estimate with a paycheck attached. The interviewers' favorite filter: candidates who jump to a dollar figure miss the two numbers that actually break deployments, peak QPS and tokens-per-minute limits.

A 5-minute warm-up that quietly tests the most useful idea in practical coding: choosing a canonical key. The sorted-string vs character-count tradeoff is exactly what interviewers want to hear you reason about.

The interval pattern shows up everywhere in FDE loops: calendars, flight segments, log windows. Master the sort-then-sweep idiom here and three other interview questions fall out for free.

The reported ElevenLabs live round, written in a shared Google Doc, no execution, no autocomplete. Inherited folder permissions plus permission-change timestamps, and the two-axis resolution rule that keeps the code to thirty lines.

Averages lie, and interviewers know most candidates quote them anyway. The fastest way to sound production-grade in any latency discussion is to reason about percentiles correctly, including the one trap almost everyone falls into.

Top-K is the most reused primitive in FDE interviews: it reappears inside log parsers, analytics questions, and retrieval ranking. Three solutions exist; knowing which one to lead with is the real test.

Kernel optimization is mostly the art of feeding 100+ TFLOPs from the small fast end of this hierarchy. Know the rough latencies and bandwidths, interviewers listen for the numbers.

One malformed message can silently wedge an entire pipeline, and it happens at every customer eventually. The DLQ answer interviewers want covers what most candidates forget: what happens *after* the message lands there.