Design a Planner-Coder-Reviewer-Tester system that turns a Jira ticket into tested code and fixes its own bugs.
The hard parts are not the four roles. They are the communication substrate, a termination condition that is not just a retry cap, and stopping the Coder from forgetting the ticket after five repair cycles.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The hard parts are not the four roles. They are the communication substrate, a termination condition that is not just a retry cap, and stopping the Coder from forgetting the ticket after five repair cycles.
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.
