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FDE Interview Loop: From a real Founding FDE @ Notion

Hosted by Paden Gayle

Fri, Sep 25, 2026

6:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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519 students

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Become a Forward Deployed Engineer: The Future-Proof Path for Software Engineers
Paden Gayle
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What you'll learn

Map the real FDE interview loop

Walk the stages past coding, from applied AI design to customer discovery, and see which round decides the offer.

Spot what cuts strong engineers

The mistake that has nothing to do with technical skill, why it reads as a red flag, and how to avoid making it.

Know what interviewers are scoring

What separates a fine answer from one that gets remembered, and the signal panels look for in every single round

Why this topic matters

FDE is one of the hardest roles to interview for right now, and most people prep wrong. They grind LeetCode and system design like it's a normal SWE loop. The real loop tests something else: can you scope a messy customer problem, make a call with incomplete information, and hold a room. Miss what it's testing and strong engineers get cut. I do this job. Not a version of it from five years ago, and not a version I read about.

You'll learn from

Paden Gayle

Founding FDE @ Notion | O'Reilly Author | Ex-Google, Bloomberg

I'm a founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Notion, where I built the technical delivery model our team uses to run high-stakes enterprise migrations. I'm also writing The Forward Deployed Engineer's Handbook for O'Reilly, the first definitive guide to the role.

Before Notion I was a Software Engineer at Google and Bloomberg, building certificate authority infrastructure and large-scale data platforms. I've also coached 600+ engineers through career transitions into top companies.

I teach this because I'm doing the job right now, not summarizing it from articles. Everything in my workshops comes from live engagements: real scoping decisions, real security reviews, real stakeholder fights. If you want to break into Applied AI, learn it from the trenches.

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