Not a reading list. A route from where you are now to the engineering, AI, customer judgment and interview evidence the role demands.
THE HONEST START
Many employers hire for production judgment associated with experienced engineers. That does not mean “wait two years.” It means your route must build the missing evidence instead of pretending the title has no prerequisites.
College learners begin with engineering foundations. Experienced builders skip them. Both converge on the same standard: ship for a real user, measure correctness, handle failure and explain the outcome.
YOUR ROUTE
Not sure? The six-question diagnostic recommends a route without requiring an account.
WEEKLY STUDY PLAN
Estimates include lessons, practice and project work. Shipping evidence matters more than racing through links.
THE CURRICULUM
Know the job before training for the title.
Explain the full deployment arc, its trade-offs, and where your current skills fit.
Personal gap map and study route
Explain who defines “correct” in an FDE engagement and what success looks like after handoff.
Become the person who can build without copying a tutorial.
Build, test and deploy an API-backed application using Git, HTTP and a relational database.
Deployed API and data-ingestion service
Build and debug a small service, then explain every dependency and failure path.
Move from “works locally” to reliable, observable and reversible.
Integrate unreliable systems and operate the result under real failure conditions.
Reliable webhook/data pipeline with runbook
Defend the architecture and recover it from an injected outage without losing or duplicating data.
Measure quality instead of declaring that the demo looks good.
Build a secure AI workflow with tools, retrieval and a calibrated evaluation gate.
AI workflow, golden set and CI eval report
Show human agreement, failure categories, threshold choice and a regression caught before release.
Turn ambiguity, constraints and politics into a trusted next step.
Scope, secure, demonstrate, roll out and prove value for a customer deployment.
Scope, stakeholder map, security response and executive readout
Pass a scenario containing a scope change, security blocker, failed demo and skeptical executive.
One customer. One messy workflow. The whole arc.
Deliver a coherent engagement and defend both the engineering and customer outcome.
Nine-artifact public portfolio case study
Technical review, customer-outcome review and a recorded ten-minute defense.
Convert evidence into interviews, then pass the real loop.
Present your work clearly and perform across coding, decomposition, systems and client scenarios.
Targeted portfolio, story bank and mock-loop report
Pass a complete mock loop and close every red area in the readiness rubric.
THE PORTFOLIO STANDARD
The capstone follows an insurance-claims team from an ambiguous ask to a measurable, handed-off deployment.
Open the capstone workspace →