Interview Prep Hub

Forward Deployed Engineer — Data Engineering

A study guide for FDE-flavored Data Engineering roles at enterprise contract-intelligence and document-AI platforms. The Palantir-originated FDE archetype applied to embedded customer deployments — ingestion of messy contract / invoice / PO corpora, SLA-backed extraction accuracy, customer warehouse and ERP integration, and the consultant + engineer duality the role is built on. 17 interactive HTML chapters.

Consultant + engineer, in one seatconsultantengineerFDEdiscoverycustomer politicsscope, kill criteriapipelinesSQL, modelingSLA accuracymessycontractsextractiontheirwarehouseembedded at the customer · SLA-backed accuracy · their ERP, their rules
If you only have a few hours

Open 00-START-HERE. Then read 03-fde-archetype and 04-customer-embedding — those framings are tested in every round. Drill 15-interview-questions. Reread 16-day-of the morning of.

Drill: Interview Questions Hide-show answers · per-Q tracker Core: Customer Embedding Discovery · scoping · cadence Core: SLA-Backed Quality Extraction eval · HITL · ship-to-spec
Study pathsPick the plan that fits the time you have
7+ days
  • Day 1: 01, 02 (orient) → 03 (FDE archetype)
  • Day 2: 04 (customer embedding), 05 (document extraction)
  • Day 3: 06 (pipelines), 07 (SQL & modeling)
  • Day 4: 08 (warehouse), 09 (quality & SLA)
  • Day 5: 10, 11 (coding drills on a timer)
  • Day 6: 12 (integrations), 13 (ops), 14 (domain)
  • Day 7: Drill 15. Reread 16. Sleep.
2–3 days

01, 03 (FDE archetype), 04 (customer embedding), 07 (SQL & modeling), 09 (quality), drill 5 problems from 11, 15 (drill), 16. Skim the rest.

< 24 hours

03 (FDE archetype is the single most leverage chapter), 04 (customer embedding), 09 (quality), 15 (drill all), 16. Skim 07 SQL section. Walk in honest.

Section A · Orient
00 Start Here Master index, what the loop tests, the single reframe that makes the rest click. 01 The Role, Decoded FDE — Data Engineering at a contract-intelligence platform: what it actually is, what the JD really means, where you sit between customer and product. 02 Positioning From Scratch The consultant + engineer duality. How to convey both halves honestly, and how to lean on adjacent experience when one half is thin.
Section B · FDE craft
03 The FDE Archetype Palantir-originated, now a frontier-AI standard. What makes FDE distinct from a regular SWE or DE, what the round tests for, the three behavioral patterns that disqualify candidates. Critical 04 Customer Embedding Discovery, scoping, weekly cadence with the customer, the working agreement, kill criteria, escalation paths. The operating model the loop assumes you know. Critical
Section C · Data craft
05 Document Extraction Patterns for turning unstructured contracts / invoices / POs into structured data — OCR + NLP + CV, layout-aware models, human-in-the-loop, the eval loop that backs an SLA. 06 Pipelines Under Deployment Ingestion / ETL patterns when the customer's data shape changes weekly, schemas are negotiable, and "production" lives in the customer's cloud. Reprocessing, idempotency, versioned pipelines. 07 SQL & Contract Data Modeling The contract data model — parties, obligations, renewals, spend rollups, supplier hierarchies. SQL patterns over messy real-world contract data and the joins they imply. Critical 08 Warehouse & Integration Loading clean output into the customer's Snowflake / BigQuery, integrating with their ERP (SAP, Coupa, Oracle) and BI (Looker, Power BI, Tableau). Identity, auth, refresh cadence, backfills. 09 SLA-Backed Quality & Eval The differentiating piece. How to measure extraction quality, calibrate human-in-the-loop, ship to a contracted accuracy SLA, and surface failures to the customer before they do. Critical
Section D · Coding
10 Coding Fundamentals Python patterns FDE-DE rounds reach for — dict-heavy data shaping, generators for streaming, light algos, the "write something I can ship to a customer next week" bar. 11 Coding Problems Ten drillable problems — extraction-flavored cleaning, schema reshaping, fuzzy entity resolution, reconciliation, evaluation metrics. Multiple approaches per problem. Drill mode
Section E · Production / Cloud
12 Customer Integrations The enterprise stack you'll meet — Salesforce, SAP, Coupa, Workday, NetSuite, Snowflake, BigQuery, Looker. API shapes, auth patterns, refresh cadences, the political layer behind each one. 13 Ops & Rollout Embedded ops hygiene — staging environments at the customer, change management, runbooks, rollbacks, on-call when the customer's data team is your first responder.
Section F · Reference & Execution
14 Domain Context Contract intelligence and enterprise spend — CLM history, procurement vocabulary (P2P, S2P, S2C), finance / legal personas, where the platform's revenue actually comes from. The vocabulary edge. 15 Practice Interview Questions ~30 drillable Q&A across background, FDE behavior, data craft, customer scenarios, and domain. Hide-show answers, per-question tracker, progress saved locally. Drill mode 16 Day-Of Tactics Live-coding moves, customer-scenario recovery patterns, the right questions to ask them, closing statement. Reread morning of.