Technical Screen Preparation

Many hiring processes are broken into stages, and each stage tests something different. This course uses the label Stage 2 for the technical screen. Knowing where the screen falls helps you plan your preparation, because it is a checkpoint that comes after an earlier stage and before the rest of the process.

The screen is a conversation of sixty to ninety minutes with an engineer from the FDE team. The length matters for preparation. A session that runs past an hour gives the interviewer room to probe your reasoning, change direction, and ask you to go deeper. You should not expect a single question with a single correct answer that ends the session early.

The screen is the point where the conversation shifts from who you are on paper to how you actually work through technical problems. Earlier material tells the interviewer about your background. The screen tests the reasoning itself.

A screen is usually built from two linked parts. The first is a prompt, which is the problem the engineer puts in front of you. The second is a set of follow-up questions about your work. The prompt starts the discussion, and the follow-ups carry much of the evaluation.

The follow-up questions are not an afterthought. They are part of the screen, and they are where the interviewer learns how you reasoned about the prompt, which choices you made, and what you would change. Two answers that reach the same result can look very different once the follow-ups begin, because the interviewer is examining the path you took as well as the destination.

The prompt is sometimes a take-home and sometimes a live problem. A take-home is worked on outside the conversation, while a live problem is worked on during it. In both cases the prompt is the same kind of element: the problem that starts the discussion.

The form changes how you spend your time, but it does not remove the follow-up questions. A take-home still leads into a conversation about your work. A live problem still leaves room for the interviewer to ask why you chose a particular approach. The conversation happens either way.

The following scenario is an invented illustration, not taken from the source. It shows how the parts fit together during a single session. Follow the state of the session at each step.

The source notes that the prompts its author has seen consistently in 2025 and 2026 fall into three categories. This article does not name or describe those categories, because the source excerpt does not do so. What the passage does establish is that prompts are not random. They come in recurring kinds, so you can prepare for the general shape of a prompt rather than memorizing specific problems. The three categories are described in the rest of this chapter, and that material should be read as patterns across many screens rather than a fixed script.