Decompose: design a system to route a fleet of delivery trucks.
Looks like an algorithms question; it's actually an operations question wearing one. The candidates who fail reach for 'solve VRP'; the ones who pass design for the 2pm reality that invalidates every morning plan.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Looks like an algorithms question; it's actually an operations question wearing one. The candidates who fail reach for 'solve VRP'; the ones who pass design for the 2pm reality that invalidates every morning plan.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.