Lakshya

Step 1

Pick the field you are aiming at

A field opens onto its roles. A role tells you what the job really is, decodes a real posting line by line, walks the interview loop, and links the themes it tests. A theme opens onto the chapter that teaches it.

2,609 roles · 659 JDs parsed Software Engineering 2,609 postings — the largest field here. AI appears in 89% of them, and product sense in 84%, which is higher than distributed systems at 75%. Mentorship is named in 43%, explicit testing language in 9%. 6 ROLES → 1,558 roles · 592 JDs parsed Artificial Intelligence Seven archetypes across 1,558 postings. The market split into an applied majority and a frontier minority, and most preparation targets the smaller one. 7 ROLES → 1,405 roles · 427 JDs parsed Platform & Developer Experience Seven archetypes across 1,405 postings. What the field discusses loudest — internal developer platforms, DORA, supply chain — appears in under 5% of postings. 7 ROLES → 1,060 roles · 362 JDs parsed Cyber, Risk & Internal Audit Seven archetypes across 1,060 postings. AI appears in 92% of them — but AI-specific risk practice in only 9%. That gap is the opportunity. 7 ROLES → 670 roles · 243 JDs parsed IT Infrastructure Network, servers, storage, datacentre and production management. 670 postings — and 26% of them are AI and GPU cluster buildout, which has revived a field people had written off. 6 ROLES → 182 roles · 104 JDs parsed Identity & Privileged Access Identity appears in 87% of all security postings — the highest of any single topic. Agent identity is becoming a job title in its own right. 6 ROLES → 2,082 roles · 337 India postings via Workday GCC, Site & Engineering Leadership 2,082 leadership postings, and a finding that matters if you are aiming at one: the classic GCC Head role barely appears on public boards. What does appear, in volume, is Principal IC and Engineering Manager. 6 ROLES → 1,480 roles · 481 JDs parsed Product, Delivery & Technology Finance 1,480 postings — and two findings that should change where you aim. The dedicated agile-ceremony roles have effectively vanished at these employers, and FinOps barely exists as a title even though cost is a stated responsibility in 40% of postings. 7 ROLES → 237 roles · 114 JDs parsed across two corpora Data Platform & Analytics 237 postings, and the ranking is not what the field's own discourse talks about: privacy and compliance appear in 82% — more than SQL — half name cost, and real-time outnumbers batch seven to one. A reader-supplied sample adds two more: Databricks or Snowflake named in 66% of enterprise postings, and statistics in 44%. 8 ROLES → 1,426 roles · 494 JDs parsed Technical Go-To-Market & Customer Success 1,426 postings. Customer-facing language in 99% of them and technical depth in 60% — these are technical roles that engineers dismiss and that are consequently under-competed relative to what they pay. 6 ROLES → 2,173 roles · 690 JDs parsed Sales 2,173 postings — the largest single category in the corpus. Quota in 87%, self-generated pipeline in 84%, and technical depth in 56%, which is the door for anyone crossing over from an engineering background. 5 ROLES → 185 roles · 31 JDs parsed Product Design & UX 185 postings, and AI appears in 93% of them — the highest share of any field measured here. Accessibility is named in 51%, which is higher than most designers expect. 4 ROLES → 632 roles · 141 JDs parsed Legal, Finance & People 632 postings. Scaling appears in 93%, data and analytics in 91% and AI in 84% — these functions are being asked to build systems rather than process transactions, which is what makes them different from their equivalents elsewhere. 5 ROLES → India + US · written from exchange, regulator and vendor sources Trading & Capital Markets Eight archetypes across the buy side, the sell side, exchanges, brokers and the firms that keep the market honest. Written for both the Indian and the US market, because the plumbing differs more than people expect and the interviews differ with it. 8 ROLES →

Why this exists

You are probably preparing for the wrong tenth of the market.

Reading the full text of 592 US AI job descriptions produces a ranking hard to reconcile with how people study. Agents and tool use appear in 64%, evaluation in 59%, customer-facing work in 58%. PyTorch appears in 11%, a PhD in 11%, RLHF in 4%.

The same shape appeared in every field since. Platform discourse talks about internal developer platforms; postings ask for compliance and customer work. Security postings mention AI in 92% of cases and AI risk practice in 9%. Infrastructure was supposedly dying, and a quarter of its postings are now AI cluster buildout. What a field talks about loudest is reliably not what it hires for.

Step 2

Learn the thing underneath

26 books, 341 chapters, written to teach rather than to summarise. If you have avoided AI because it looked like it needed mathematics, AI from First Principles assumes none.

13 CHAPTERS The Interview Spine The seven things every archetype on this site tests, whatever the job title. Start here if you are preparing for an interview. 31 CHAPTERS Software Engineering What postings now ask for, system design at the level actually assessed, product sense for engineers, code and review, debugging and the coding round, what changes from mid to staff, the loop round by round, and choosing a track. 20 CHAPTERS LLM Systems Engineering Seven chapters on the engineering underneath applied AI: the roofline and KV-cache arithmetic that explain every serving decision, quantisation with the evidence, serving stacks and the prompt-cache traps that cost real money, retrieval internals and whether long context replaced RAG, agents at the token level, evaluation with actual statistics, and what won in post-training. 10 CHAPTERS AI from First Principles Seven chapters, no mathematics assumed. What a model actually is, what training means, why it is confidently wrong, embeddings, RAG, agents, and evaluation. 18 CHAPTERS Networks, Automation, Connectivity & Data Centres Twelve chapters from a single packet to a submarine cable. Subnetting worked by hand, BGP and why hijacks succeed, DNS and the two outages worth knowing by name, TLS and the expiry that still takes down companies, cloud networking with the arithmetic, transit and peering, colocation and what an AI rack did to the industry, and four debugging scenarios worked end to end. 15 CHAPTERS SDLC, DevOps & Developer Experience How software actually gets from a developer's machine to production: deployment strategies and the version-skew problem underneath them, infrastructure as code and the state file that runs everything, pipeline design that people do not route around, and the software supply chain link by link. 9 CHAPTERS Cloud Platform Engineering Seven chapters comparing the three major clouds where they genuinely differ: the compute spectrum and the ceilings that decide it, managed Kubernetes and the address exhaustion nobody plans for, identity models that do not transfer, networking and the internal traffic that outcosts your egress, storage and database traps, committed-use and spot mechanics, and an honest read on frameworks, market share and certifications. 12 CHAPTERS Security Engineering Four chapters on the security work that is not about AI: cryptographic choices with one right answer each, the vulnerability classes that actually cause breaches and their structural fixes, the cloud misconfigurations that appear in nearly every incident report, and detection engineering with the first hour of a response. 33 CHAPTERS Infrastructure & Reliability Reliability and error budgets, capacity arithmetic, networks, storage and the restore you have not tested, the physical layer, a debugging method that transfers, running production, and an honest look at Kubernetes. Plus a Middleware section — web and application servers, messaging (IBM MQ, Kafka) and managed file transfer, from basics to licensing and cost. 13 CHAPTERS Securing & Governing AI The attack surface that is genuinely new, the risks that are old in new clothes, model risk, what audit evidence looks like, the frameworks, responsible AI as controls rather than principles, the enterprise AI gateway, measuring harm, and what the law actually requires. 16 CHAPTERS Identity & Access Authentication versus authorisation, federation, the joiner-mover-leaver lifecycle, entitlements, privileged access, secrets, and machine identity. 13 CHAPTERS Product & Delivery Prioritisation that survives contact, writing that lets engineering start, discovery when your users are not consumers, measurement and its failure modes, dependencies and honest status, saying no well, pricing and unit economics, and scoping a non-deterministic feature. 9 CHAPTERS Engineering Leadership What changes at each level, hiring and holding the bar, growing people and managing someone out, organisational design, running a distributed or GCC organisation, technical strategy, budget and headcount, and what each interview round actually tests. 16 CHAPTERS Data Platform & Analytics What the job actually is now, modelling and grain, data contracts and who gets paged, quality that is not a dashboard, streaming, governance, cost, serving the AI workload, Databricks versus Snowflake, and statistics without the degree. 16 CHAPTERS Databricks & Snowflake From first principles to production: the problem both solve, columnar storage, how Delta and Iceberg turn files into tables, how each engine executes a query, each platform in practice, performance, cost control, governance, and choosing between them. 18 CHAPTERS Analytics & BI Tools The four layers of the analytics stack, then Power BI, Tableau, Looker and Alteryx each in practice — what they are genuinely good at, where they hurt, how to choose with real scenarios, the licensing models that bite, and making analytics actually get used. 6 CHAPTERS Technical Go-To-Market Four jobs that look like one, discovery and the demo, proofs of concept that actually end, escalations and the account about to churn, the loop and the presentation round that decides it, and technical support as a route into product companies. 5 CHAPTERS Sales What sales postings actually ask for, the roles and how they differ, pipeline and forecasting, selling technical and AI products, the loop, and the honest version of crossing over from a technical role. 5 CHAPTERS Product Design & UX What design postings ask for, designing for systems that are sometimes wrong, research at real sample sizes, design systems and accessibility, and the portfolio review that decides the loop. 4 CHAPTERS Legal, Finance & People Business functions inside a technology company: commercial counsel and legal operations, technology finance and SaaS metrics, recruiting and people operations — and why all three are now systems-building jobs. 8 CHAPTERS Trading & Capital Markets Eight chapters on how markets actually work: the order lifecycle end to end, the limit order book and how a price is made, the Indian and US market structures side by side, what each instrument is really for, the full cost of a trade, market data and the errors that ruin research, and the latency budget. 12 CHAPTERS Technical Analysis Twelve chapters that teach charts the way a researcher would: what each claim actually is, what the evidence supports, and the control you would need to believe it. Structure, levels, moving averages, oscillators, volatility, volume, candlestick patterns, Smart Money Concepts assessed honestly, and a full methodology for testing a rule without fooling yourself. 8 CHAPTERS Security Engineering & Tooling What each category of security tool structurally cannot see, what the evidence actually supports, how the market consolidated, and what the 5,197 postings say the job is. 13 CHAPTERS Banking & Capital Markets Systems What Indian banks and financial institutions actually run — core banking, payments, lending, treasury, custody, the registrar duopoly and regulatory reporting — and, just as usefully, which of it can be verified at all. 6 CHAPTERS Blockchain, Honestly What a blockchain actually is, how consensus and smart contracts really work, how the money actually gets stolen, and a four-question test for whether it is the right tool — written for someone meeting the subject for the first time. 12 CHAPTERS Microsoft 365 & Copilot in the Enterprise How a Microsoft 365 estate is actually built, licensed and governed — tenant, identity, workloads, devices, Purview and Defender, every licence tier with current prices, and then Copilot and Copilot Studio from the request path to the evidence on whether they deliver.