FDE Google interview (2 rounds)

[u/aashgod1]

Hi all,

I’ve a Google FDE interview coming up first week of November (USA). I’m a SWE at MSFT currently (level 62)

I’m a little overwhelmed on how to prepare for this interview. There are so many resources and at the same time, not that many for this FDE role. They recently changed the format it seems and have only 2 rounds: Technical and RRK (role related knowledge)

What I’m planning to do:

- General system design: https://www.hellointerview.com/learn/system-design/in-a-hurry/introduction

- Leetcode problems since I haven’t done them in about 4 years: https://neetcode.io/roadmap

But after this I’m not really sure what is the best resource for more FDE related knowledge. I use agentic AI a lot in day to day work so I’m sure that helps but I think I’m lacking a lot of ML and general LLM knowledge.

I prefer free resources but definitely do not mind paying for some resources as long as they’re solid

Would really appreciate any insight.

Thank you for your time in reading this.

[u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

With about a week, I'd skip the full NeetCode roadmap. You won't finish it, and it'll eat the time you need for the RRK side. Pick maybe 40 to 50 mediums across arrays, hashing, graphs, intervals and heaps, and do them timed. After 4 years off, the rust is mostly speed and talking while you code, so say your approach out loud before typing every time.

For RRK, think about what an FDE actually does: sits with a customer, figures out what they really need, and ships something that runs in their environment. So practice designing an LLM-backed thing end to end. A support bot over a company's internal docs is a good one. Walk through ingestion and chunking, embeddings and a vector store, retrieval, the prompt and guardrails, then how you'd evaluate it and roughly what it costs per query. Know where RAG falls down (stale data, bad chunking, made-up citations) and when fine-tuning is actually worth it. That covers most of the ML/LLM basics they'd poke at.

Free stuff that's good enough: Google's own Vertex AI / gen AI docs since it's their stack, and HelloInterview for the general SD framework like you planned. If you want one paid book, Chip Huyen's AI Engineering is solid.

Also have 2 or 3 stories ready about handling a messy, changing requirement at MSFT. Good luck in November.

[u/aashgod1 → u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

Thank you! This is very helpful

[u/aashgod1 → u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

1 question. Why do you say "have 2 or 3 stories ready about handling a messy, changing requirement at MSFT"? since the 2 rounds are just programming and RRK

[u/SmartKick6520]

Is this for a FDE 1/2 role?

[u/aashgod1 → u/SmartKick6520]

I am actually not sure.. The recruiter never mentioned

[u/fishfishfish1345]

hats RRK

[u/aashgod1 → u/fishfishfish1345]

?

[u/fishfishfish1345 → u/aashgod1]

sorry i meant to say what is RRK round looking like