Handbook
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.
Cross-cutting. Each chapter is linked from every role that tests it.
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.
CHAPTER 8
Which market are you interviewing for?
AI-native and enterprise are two different jobs wearing one title. Studying for the wrong one is the most expensive mistake on this site.