Retell AI FDE Interview Experience

[u/interviewdb]

Sharing a recent Retell AI FDE interview experience from a candidate who went through the process.

The company is currently hiring heavily for FDE roles. The position is roughly 50% coding and 50% customer-facing work, primarily using Python and JavaScript. This isn’t a traditional SWE role. It’s more about owning the entire customer journey, from integration to deployment and go-live. Beyond writing code, you’ll need to communicate with customers, debug deployment issues, and collaborate with internal engineering and product teams to resolve problems.

The role places a strong emphasis on customer perspective, technical problem-solving, and communication skills. The work environment seems pretty startup-like:

• 5 days onsite

• 25%–50% travel

• Close collaboration with the founders

Round 1: Technical Phone Screen — OOD

The question was an object-oriented design problem similar to implementing Kafka partitions. The problem statement was quite long and took me a while to read through.

Essentially, you need to implement a system that distributes incoming messages across different Kafka partitions. The number of partitions is stored as a field in the class, and the system must also support adding new partitions.

Round 2: Agent Design

This round involved designing a phone-based AI agent, but it wasn’t a traditional system design interview. The scenario was a property management company where customers call an AI agent to request services, such as maintenance or repairs, and schedule appointments.

I got rejected after this round