Senior Engineer · FDE Candidate · Building in Public
Neeraj Sujan
I got rejected from Google FDE on July 22, 2026. Final round — the DSA round was the gap. 12-month cooling period. I decided to build the resource I wish existed and document the entire comeback in public.
"The resource is my contribution. The journey is what makes it real."
The Goal
Google FDE, L4. July 2027. After a 12-month systematic rebuild of everything the interview actually tests.
The Method
Build in public. Document everything. The resource attracts the community. The journey makes it human.
Currently exploring
DSA (Pattern Recognition)
Working through every major algorithm pattern with the FDE lens — real-world framing, not abstract grinding. 50 mock interviews, logged publicly. The goal is fluency under time pressure, not memorization.
AI Engineering
RAG, fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA, RLHF), LLM evaluation, MLOps, and GenAI on cloud. Going deep — not surface-level API integration. Completing the Vizuara Minor in GenAI.
Google Cloud Platform
Vertex AI, BigQuery, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, GKE. Hands-on, not just theoretical. Targeting Professional Cloud Architect by June 2027 via the full GCP certification track.
Building the Resource
Cracking the FDE Interview — open source, community-owned. The most comprehensive resource for FDE and AI Engineering interviews. System-design-primer quality, for a role type nobody has documented well.
What I'm building
cracking-the-fde-interview
Open source · github.com/backend-bytes127
The most comprehensive open source resource for Forward Deployed Engineer and AI Engineering interviews. DSA patterns, RAG, GCP deep dives, company-specific guides. MIT licensed. Community owned.
Weekly Log
Every week, documented
Raw and honest. What I studied, mock interview scores, certification progress, and what went wrong. Not a highlight reel — a real log.
Certifications
Anthropic → GCP track
Anthropic API Fundamentals and Prompt Engineering (Aug 2026) → Cloud Digital Leader → Professional ML Engineer → Professional Data Engineer → Professional Cloud Architect (Jun 2027).
This Site
The public commitment
Everything documented here. The journey is public because public accountability is real accountability. Follow along — neerajsujan.com.
Thinkers who shaped this
system-design-primer (Alex Xu) on building resources that become the canonical reference. Chip Huyen on what production ML actually looks like. The NeetCode approach to DSA — pattern recognition, not memorization.
The goal is to build the FDE equivalent — a resource good enough that anyone targeting Google FDE, Anthropic, or Meta AI engineering would be disadvantaged not to have read it.
Why write in public
Writing is how I think. Sharing it is how I stay honest. A private note lets you be vague. A public post doesn't.
The best thing that happens is someone reads this and it changes how they think about something. The second best thing is it changes how I think about something.
AI will change what it means to produce content. It won't change what it means to have a perspective — to have done the work, to have something real to say.
That's the bet this site is making.