You get a vague prompt like 'design a system to detect fraud.' What do you do in the first ten minutes?

The Palantir decomposition round has no right answer, it has a right METHOD, and it's the most-failed interview in the FDE loop. Here is the four-move rubric interviewers actually score: clarify, model, spine, iterate.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.