OpenAI FDE Interview Prep

Building an agent with OpenAI's APIs is one skill. Explaining what an FDE delivers, defending a design when evaluation results conflict with customer expectations, and pushing back on unsafe requirements while maintaining customer trust require a broader set of skills. This course helps you practise the technical reasoning, customer judgment, and communication skills relevant to OpenAI FDE interviews. I developed this course based on my experience building large-scale systems at Microsoft and Meta and interviewing hundreds of candidates across both companies. The most common weaknesses I observed weren't always related to technical knowledge. Even experienced engineers struggled when they had to reason through ambiguous problems, justify trade-offs under scrutiny, or recognize requirements that introduced unacceptable risks. Customer-facing engineering roles also require clear communication and sound judgment, particularly when technical decisions affect customer outcomes. The course begins with the FDE role: the systems these engineers help customers build and deploy, how their responsibilities differ from those of solutions architects and other customer-facing engineers, and how OpenAI's mission relates to deployment decisions. You'll then develop practical knowledge of the Responses API, tool calling, Structured Outputs, the Agents SDK, MCP, multi-agent orchestration, and the Realtime API. You'll apply these concepts to system design, including failure containment, evaluation datasets, prompt-injection defenses, and trace-based debugging. Next, you'll prepare for interview stages covering project experience, technical design, customer scenarios, and mission alignment. The course concludes with three case studies: a telecom support agent, a wealth management research assistant, and a clinical note-drafting application for a hospital network. By the end, you'll have practised explaining technical decisions, handling customer constraints, and approaching both engineering and non-technical interview questions.