FDE Times: treat Anthropic's FDE job posting as your interview syllabus—MCP technical screen, step-wise coding, design that starts with questions
An October 16 FDE Times guide maps Anthropic's London Forward Deployed Engineer posting onto a four-round sample loop (recruiter, Claude/MCP technical screen, incremental coding, design plus behavioural). Prep production LLM work and clarifying questions first; Claude is allowed for prep, not for live assessments unless the interviewer says so.
FDE Times published an October 16 prep guide for Anthropic's Forward Deployed Engineer role that treats the job posting as a syllabus rather than an advert. The London Applied AI posting asks for 4+ years in a technical, customer-facing role, production LLM experience (prompting, agents, evals), strong Python, and the ability to navigate ambiguous organisations—plus 25–50% customer travel.
Drawing on Exponent/Aced sample processes, the piece maps those requirements to four rounds: a recruiter call, a technical screen centred on deploying Claude with MCP and long-context stability, a CodeSignal-style coding exercise that adds a requirement at each step, and a final panel that combines customer solution design with behavioural questions. The recommended prep is concrete: build a small MCP server against a real data source, practise extensible Python with tests, and ask who will use the system and what a wrong answer costs before drawing architecture.
Anthropic's published AI-use rules for candidates matter for this loop: Claude is fine for refining applications and practising answers, but live interviews and take-homes are "all you" unless the interviewer allows assistance. For FDE candidates, the takeaway is to stop grinding algorithms for a role whose technical screen looks more like an on-site Claude deployment than LeetCode.
Source: fdetimes.net