Field Engineering

The customer-facing half of the job: discovery, qualification and sizing, performance testing engagements, POCs, migration, commercials and security, and escalation. The technical depth it leans on lives in the other parts and is linked, not repeated.

For: Sales engineers, solutions architects, and forward deployed engineers.

Included in: Superstar FDE. Progress made here counts there too.

The stages, their chapters, and what “done” means for each are in path.tsv.

practice/bin/ol learn field-engineering          # stages and progress
practice/bin/ol learn field-engineering next     # read the next unfinished stage

Stages

Generated from path.tsv. Track progress locally with practice/bin/ol learn.

Stage	Read	Done when
1	Discovery Discovery	From a mock discovery call you produce notes in which every answer is mapped to the deployment decision it changes.
2	Qualification and sizing Qualification and Sizing	You turn discovery notes into a deployment hypothesis: model, GPUs, serverless or dedicated, quantization, and a cost range, with the math shown.
3	Performance testing engagements Performance Testing Engagements	You write a benchmark plan from a customer traffic sample and a results report with curves and goodput under their SLO, promising nothing the data does not show.
4	POC and evaluation POC and Evaluation	You write a POC plan with success criteria tied to SLOs and eval parity, owners, timeline, and exit criteria.
5	Migration and cutover Migration and Cutover	You write a migration plan with chat-template and sampling parity checks, shadow traffic, canary, cutover, and rollback.
6	Commercials and security Commercials and Security	You build a TCO comparison of serverless, dedicated, and self-hosting with a breakeven point, and can walk a security questionnaire.
7	Escalation and handoff Escalation and Handoff	You write an escalation report the performance team can act on without a follow-up question.