On 9/30 an external recruiter reached out to me about the Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Mandarin) position at Retell AI. We chatted for about 15 minutes, mostly confirming my background, language, location/work authorization, etc., and then they submitted me to the company. On 10/6 the Retell recruiter scheduled the formal intro call.
The intro call was about 15-20 minutes. The recruiter spent quite a lot of time at the start introducing the company and the FDE role. Retell was founded in early 2024 and does voice AI. It has 50-some people now, and the recruiter said the company is already profitable.
The FDE role is roughly 50% coding and 50% customer facing, with the coding mainly in Python / JavaScript. An FDE starts from the customer's deployment kickoff and works with the customer's technical and non-technical teams all the way until a successful deployment. The role has 25%-50% travel.
The work setup is a bit unusual: Monday to Friday onsite in Redwood City, plus a full day remote on Sunday. The recruiter explicitly said it is a 6-day working week. The exact start and end time each day is flexible, depending mainly on execution and the customer.
The base salary range the recruiter gave was $180K-$300K.
On H-1B, I asked about transfer, and the recruiter said clearly that the company supports it and has experience with it. He also mentioned they have filed H-1Bs for people on the FDE team before, though he would need to confirm internally which occupational/job code the FDE role uses.
They didn't really ask me much, mainly two questions:
Give me a specific example of a time when you had to communicate a complex technical concept to a non-technical audience. How did you approach it?
Explain what a database index is.
Neither was hard. It felt like this round was mostly about background, communication, and role fit, not a technical interview.
For the database index question, I answered mainly from practical usage, and mentioned primary keys, Cassandra, and an example of querying by a combination of order number and customer number. My answer was kind of scattered. Looking back, I should have given a simple one-sentence definition first, and then the example and the trade-offs.
For the technical-concept communication question, I answered with a scenario from my current job: when upstream/downstream teams or business stakeholders hit an order problem, we first pin down the technical cause, then explain the problem, how we're handling it, and the ETA based on the other person's technical background, using everyday analogies when needed. Honestly I didn't turn it into a complete, specific STAR example, it was more me describing my communication approach.
The recruiter described the rest of the process as: 45 min live coding, then a 45 min Product & Customer troubleshooting exercise, then a final 2 hours (a 90 min deployment exercise plus 30 min talking with the CTO/cofounder).
About me: I have a few years of backend / distributed systems experience, currently work on production backend/platform, and have startup and customer-facing experience from before.
I'm still waiting for an update from the hiring team. If I move on to the live coding, I'll come back and update this post. If I make it into the later rounds (live coding / Product & Customer troubleshooting / final), I'll keep posting updates. Thanks everyone!
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