The six FDE skill dimensions

1–3: Build and integrate

Production engineering, systems integration, and AI/data fluency form the technical half of the role. The bar is practical: can you make a system work against real data, identity, network, security, and operational constraints?

• Production: testing, debugging, reliability, observability, rollback
• Systems: APIs, data contracts, identity, networking, failure modes
• AI/data: evals, retrieval, tool use, data quality, latency and cost

4–6: Judge and own

Customer judgment, ambiguity scoping, and deployment ownership separate FDE work from isolated implementation. These skills turn code into adoption and protect a team from building the wrong thing quickly.

• Customer judgment: discovery, trust, expectation setting, executive communication
• Ambiguity: assumptions, constraints, smallest useful deployment, reversible decisions
• Ownership: risk surfacing, rollout, stabilization, adoption, handoff

How to assess yourself

Do not ask whether you have heard of a concept. Ask for a concrete example where your decision changed an outcome. Evidence is a shipped system, a difficult trade-off, an incident handled, a scope reset, or an adoption result.

Use the readiness assessment as a conversation starter, then validate the result against a real target job description.