Your pilot wowed the customer. Take it to production: 99.9% SLA, real users, their security team watching. Design the path.
The capstone FDE question, where every topic in this category shows up as one workstream. The rubric isn't the target architecture; it's whether you can sequence the gap-closing while the customer keeps using the pilot.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The capstone FDE question, where every topic in this category shows up as one workstream. The rubric isn't the target architecture; it's whether you can sequence the gap-closing while the customer keeps using the pilot.
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.
