enterprise

Enterprise deals die in this design review. The answer has three layers most candidates blur together: who you are, what you can see, and how an embedded product proves both, plus the permission-staleness trap that fails Glean loops.

The defining Palantir-style deployment question. Everything your laptop did silently (package pulls, API calls, telemetry, auth callbacks, clock sync you never thought about) becomes a named workstream. Strong answers produce the checklist by category, not by anecdote.

The question that defines forward-deployed engineering as a discipline: production you're responsible for but can't touch. The answer is a system (version skew, telemetry tiers, diagnostic bundles, release trains), not a collection of favors from customer IT.

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.

No egress is the easy half. The hard half is that an auditor will read your logs, your access trail, and your model-update process for the next three years. The strong answer designs the evidence the audit consumes as a first-class output.

The security ambush kills more enterprise AI deals than accuracy ever will, and it's pass/fail on precision. Here's the answer stack a strong FDE has memorized, and the one response that ends the meeting.

'Can't leave our environment' means four different things to four different stakeholders. The FDE skill is decomposing the demand into the actual requirement, and knowing which deployment tier each requirement really needs.

SOC 2 fluency is the price of admission to enterprise deals, and interviewers check it with two traps: what a SOC 2 report actually proves, and what it doesn't. Engineers who can read one are rarer than you'd think.