Deployment Readiness

What To Know

FDE roles do not always require deep platform engineering, but they consistently care about production-minded delivery. A demo that can be run, configured, observed, and debugged is more convincing than a clever notebook.

Core Checklist

• Clear setup instructions.
• Environment variables documented.
• Secrets kept out of source control.
• Health check endpoint or status check.
• Basic logging.
• Error states visible to the user.
• Retry path for failed operations.
• Database migration or seed process documented.
• Known limitations documented.
• Rollback or disable path described.

Cloud Concepts To Recognize

• AWS IAM, S3, Lambda, ECS, RDS, CloudWatch.
• Docker images and containers.
• CI/CD pipeline.
• Terraform or infrastructure-as-code.
• Monitoring and alerting.
• Cost and scale tradeoffs.

Interview Angle

Strong phrasing:

I do not need every customer deployment to be over-engineered, but I want every deployment to have a clear setup path, visible failure modes, and enough logging to troubleshoot with the customer.