Anthropic FDE Interview Prep

Many engineers can build an agent with Claude. Fewer can explain how Anthropic expects it to be built, defend a design to a skeptical panel, or hold a safety boundary when a customer pushes for more. Anthropic's Forward Deployed Engineer interview tests all of it, and this course prepares you for every part. I built this course from my years designing large-scale systems at Microsoft and Meta, and from interviewing hundreds of candidates at both. The pattern I kept seeing had little to do with technical knowledge. Strong engineers lost rounds because they couldn't reason through an ambiguous problem out loud, defend their trade-offs, or show judgment when the requirements pushed against a boundary. The FDE loop raises that bar, because you're also being evaluated on how you'd behave in front of a customer. The course starts with the FDE role itself: what FDEs ship, how the role differs from solutions, ML, and sales engineering, and how Anthropic's build philosophy shapes every deployment. You'll then build fluency in the Claude stack, including the Messages API, tool use, the Claude Agent SDK, MCP, and sub-agent orchestration, and apply it to system design: agent workflows, failure containment, evaluation sets, and guardrails. Next, you'll walk through the full interview loop, from recruiter screen to values round, with what each round tests. Three regulated case studies close the course: loan document flagging, a HIPAA-bound clinical scheduling assistant, and insurance claims triage. Each runs through discovery, design, a values challenge, and a debrief. If you’re serious about landing an FDE role, this is where you prepare for every round, not just the technical one.