The handbook
What all fourteen archetypes share
Each archetype in the atlas has its own loop and its own decisive round. Underneath, they test the same seven things. These chapters are where preparation compounds — learn the loop once and it answers the question in whichever vocabulary the interviewer happens to use.
CHAPTER 1
Measuring what resists measurement
Named in 59% of AI postings and 42% of platform postings. Almost nobody studies it deliberately.
CHAPTER 2
The control
One habit separates strong candidates from plausible ones more reliably than any technical depth.
CHAPTER 3
Design under constraint
The decisive round for SRE, AI Platform, Infrastructure — and the reason strong engineers fail it.
CHAPTER 4
Latency and cost arithmetic
The one piece of maths that is genuinely counterintuitive — and it comes up in every agent interview.
CHAPTER 5
Discovery before solution
The decisive round in three separate archetypes, with the lowest pass rate of any stage.
CHAPTER 6
Failure and incident narrative
Every archetype asks for this story. The outage is the setting; the decisions are the content.
CHAPTER 7
Reading a job description
About 70% of a posting is boilerplate. Knowing where the other 30% lives changes how you apply.