# Session: Amazon Web Services (AWS EMEA SARL, Switzerland Branch) — Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, AWS Forward Deployed Engineering

## JD Integrity
- File/source: `output/AWS_Senior_FDE_Zurich/JD_aws_senior_fde_zurich.txt` — amazon.jobs job ID **10504263**, `https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/10504263`
- Retrieval method and date: Playwright headless scrape via `job_scout/.venv`, **2026-08-18**. The `amazon.jobs/*.json` endpoint returns HTTP 406, so the rendered page body was captured.
- Verbatim posting: **YES** — full visible posting body, not reconstructed.
- Posting status: **LIVE**, posted **2026-08-17** (one day before retrieval). Legal entity AWS EMEA SARL (Switzerland Branch), Zürich.

## Application Decision
- Audience profile: **International Tech** (US-tech conventions, role in Europe — config.md default)
- Evidence Fit: **69/100**
- Fit class: **Adjacent** (60–74)
- Hard gate: **PASS on minimum qualifications — but see the title-defining caveat below.** All four Basic Qualifications are Direct. No minimum qualification is a Gap.
- Channel Strength: **Weak** (cold application; no AWS contact recorded)
- Channel plan: Cold today. AWS Zurich + a brand-new org announced 2026-06-30 means recruiters are actively sourcing — a targeted note to the FDE recruiter is the highest-value warm action available.
- Cohort slot: Core 1/7, **Adjacent 1/2 → this would take the last Adjacent slot (2/2)**, Stretch 0/1
- Decision: **NO-GO — CLOSED 2026-08-18, user declined at the Phase 0 gate.**
  69/100 is below the bar the user is willing to spend a package on, and the
  title-defining Gap stands. **Cohort slot NOT consumed — Adjacent stays 1/2.**
  The gate worked as designed: this was caught before any bullet was written.

### The caveat that must not be buried
`critique_framework.md` triggers a NO-GO flag when "a title-defining capability is not Direct."
**Forward deployment — embedding inside a strategic enterprise customer — is exactly that, and it is a Gap.**
The evidence base actively forbids the claim:

- `claims.json` **SW-4 forbidden:** `"customer-embedded delivery"`, `"strategic customer delivery"`, `"C-suite advisor"`
- `claims.json` **VZ-1 forbidden:** `"customer-embedded"`
- `claims.json` **global_forbidden_output_patterns:** `"customer-embedded delivery"`
- `application_strategy.md` lists **"strategic-account FDE" under Stretch targets**
- `historical_outputs.json` marks `output/Microsoft_ISE_Senior_SWE` unsafe for exactly this: *"customer-delivery framing exceeds verified evidence"*

So the single phrase that best describes this job is one we are never allowed to write about Dennis.
This is scored as Adjacent rather than No-Go because AWS's *published minimum bar is pure software
engineering* (see Requirements table) — they are hiring builders into a new org and transferring the
embedded model, not requiring prior consulting tenure. That is a real argument, not a rationalisation,
but it is an argument about AWS's intent, not about Dennis's evidence.

## Requirements

| # | Requirement | Required/preferred | Direct/Adjacent/Gap/Constraint | Canonical evidence | Gate? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B1 | 5+ years non-internship professional software development | Required | **Direct** | Continuous employment 2014-11 → present (~11.5 yrs) | Yes — PASS |
| B2 | 5+ years programming with at least one language | Required | **Direct** | Python, Java, C#, C++ across SWISSCOM/BOSCH/FRAUNHOFER/VIZRT (BS-2, VZ-1, FC-3) | Yes — PASS |
| B3 | 5+ years leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability, scaling) of new **and existing** systems | Required | **Direct** | SW-2 Component Owner of business-critical Fulfillment ETL (operation, data quality, incidents, on-call); BS-3 Application Owner with SLOs; SW-3 Python apps on Kubernetes + GitLab CI/CD; SW-7 governed data products | Yes — PASS |
| B4 | Experience as a mentor, tech lead, or leading an engineering team | Required | **Adjacent** | Staff Engineer IV (Apr 2025→); BS-3 training and documentation; GN-1 trained teams on BDD/test automation; Leadership Cohort 2025. **No formal tech-lead title or direct reports.** | Yes — PASS (hedged) |
| P1 | Bachelor's in CS or equivalent | Preferred | **Direct** | M.Eng. Computer Aided Engineering (Software Design & Engineering), UniBw München | No |
| P2 | 5+ years full SDLC — coding standards, code review, source control, build, testing, operations | Preferred | **Direct** | VZ-2 automated A/V integration tests wired to CI/CD; FC-1 Jenkins CI/CD; SW-3 GitLab CI/CD; GN-1 test automation | No |
| P3 | Experience building production AI or ML applications, **including agentic workflows** | Preferred | **Gap (agentic) / Adjacent (production ML)** | BS-1 integrated containerized ML inference into 24/7 semiconductor production — genuine production ML. **But SW-8 forbids `"agent orchestration"`, `"built production LLM systems"`.** No RAG, no vector DB, no multi-agent framework anywhere in claims.json | No |
| P4 | Strong written/verbal communication; comfort in customer-facing environments | Preferred | **Adjacent** | SW-4 delivers data products with **internal B2B** stakeholders and product owners — explicitly *"not external consulting or strategic-account delivery"* | No |
| R1 | Embed within customer engineering teams; **up to 30–50% travel** | Responsibility (title-defining) | **Gap + Constraint** | No evidence; forbidden phrasing (SW-4, VZ-1, global). Travel itself is workable — user is travel-OK from a Bern base, no relocation | — |
| R2 | Build production AI apps: orchestration layers for multi-agent systems, retrieval pipelines, workflow automation | Responsibility | **Gap** | SW-8 forbids agent orchestration. Real adjacent: configured domain-grounded LLM assistants, LiteLLM gateway, custom GPTs, Copilot, **Kiro** | — |
| R3 | Own production — rollout, incidents across models/distributed systems/data pipelines, monitoring, CI/CD, rollback, resiliency | Responsibility | **Direct** | SW-2 (incidents, on-call, data quality), SW-3 (K8s + CI/CD), BS-3 (SLOs), BS-4 (ELK/Kafka anomaly detection + monitoring) | — |
| R4 | Codify reusable patterns, accelerators, reference architectures | Responsibility | **Adjacent** | SW-7 data-product modelling and documentation; BS-5 Spotfire C# extensions co-owned | — |
| R5 | Build internal AI tools to scale the FDE motion | Responsibility | **Adjacent** | SW-8 LiteLLM APIs, custom GPTs with fed domain knowledge | — |
| R6 | Route field signal into product feedback (PFRs) | Responsibility | **Adjacent** | SW-4 stakeholder translation; BS-3 vendor management | — |
| C1 | Location Zürich; work authorization | Constraint | **Direct** | German citizen (EU) + Swiss B permit — no sponsorship. Bern→Zürich ~1h by rail | — |
| C2 | English working language | Constraint | **Direct** | English fluent; German native (bonus for DACH accounts) | — |

**Tally:** Required 3 Direct + 1 Adjacent, **0 Gap** → minimum-qualification gate PASSES.
Responsibilities: 1 Direct, 3 Adjacent, **2 Gap** — one of which is title-defining.

## Evidence Fit — dimension table

| Dimension | Weight | Score | Reasoning |
|---|---:|---:|---|
| Required qualifications | 35 | **29** | All four Basic Quals Direct/near-Direct; B4 hedged (no formal lead title). Preferred P3 agentic is a Gap. |
| Core responsibilities | 25 | **11** | Only R3 (own production) is Direct. R1 embedding and R2 agentic are Gaps; R1 is title-defining. |
| Level and ownership | 15 | **9** | Staff Engineer IV + Component/Application Owner matches "Senior" IC scope well. No external-account authority. |
| Recency and depth | 10 | **8** | Current, substantial: AWS, Kubernetes, Python, production ownership all present-tense at Swisscom. |
| Domain/tool transfer | 10 | **7** | **AWS is the ecosystem match** (contrast: claims.json marks GCP `output: forbidden`). Bedrock/AgentCore unused but adjacent to LiteLLM. Kiro genuinely used. |
| Practical constraints | 5 | **5** | Zürich commutable, EU citizen + B permit, English, travel acceptable. |
| **Total** | **100** | **69** | **Adjacent** |

## Competitive Read
- **Obvious-fit candidate:** a consulting-side senior engineer from AWS ProServe, Palantir, Accenture Applied Intelligence or a Big-4 AI practice who has already shipped LLM/agentic systems *inside* client environments, and who is used to 50% travel and client politics.
- **Dennis's advantage:** genuine **production ownership** — on-call, incidents, SLOs, data quality on business-critical pipelines. Many FDE applicants are strong at prototypes and weak at running things. He also brings AWS-native depth, native German for DACH accounts, and hands-on Kiro use (AWS's own agentic IDE, named in the JD).
- **Their advantage:** they have actually done the title-defining thing — embedded delivery against strategic accounts — and they have the agentic/RAG production track record listed in the preferred quals.
- **Level/scope comparison:** Level matches (Senior IC, not people-management). The gap is *function*, not seniority. That is the honest read.

## Company Context
- **The org is 7 weeks old.** AWS announced Forward Deployed Engineering on **2026-06-30** with a **$1bn** commitment, planning to deploy *thousands* of engineers. Model: small teams of ~5–6 embedded at customer sites for ~45-day engagements. Explicitly positioned as **not traditional consulting** — the stated goal is transferring expertise so customers operate the systems themselves. The JD's "This initiative is scaling rapidly" is literal.
- **Why that matters for Dennis:** a brand-new org hiring at volume screens differently from a mature consulting practice. They need builders who can run production, and they are training the embedded motion. This is the strongest structural argument for an Adjacent application.
- **Kiro** — the JD says "as we already do with AWS Transform and Kiro." Kiro is AWS's spec-driven agentic IDE, GA March 2026, successor to Amazon Q Developer, routing Claude Sonnet + Amazon Nova over Bedrock. **Dennis uses Kiro** (config.md verified GenAI toolchain). This is a rare, first-party, verifiable hook — not a vocabulary match.
- **AWS Zurich** office is operational with active hiring (Delivery Consultant, Practice Manager, Solutions Manager roles alongside this one).

## Framing Strategy
- **Professional identity:** Staff-level engineer who **builds and runs production systems on AWS** — pipelines, data products, containerized services — and has integrated ML inference into a 24/7 industrial environment.
- **Lead narrative:** *"I don't hand over prototypes; I own what happens at 3am."* Production ownership is the honest differentiator against a prototype-heavy FDE applicant pool.
- **Strongest proof points:** SW-2 Component Owner (incidents/on-call/data quality) · BS-1 containerized ML inference into 24/7 semiconductor production · SW-3 Python on Kubernetes + GitLab CI/CD · SW-7 governed data products on AWS · BS-4 ELK/Kafka anomaly detection.
- **Honest adjacent bridges:**
  - AI work → frame as **integration and enablement** (configured domain-grounded assistants, LiteLLM gateway, Kiro, Copilot), never as agent orchestration.
  - Customer-facing → frame as **internal B2B stakeholder delivery and vendor/Application ownership** (SW-4, BS-3), never as embedded or strategic-account delivery.
- **Explicit gaps — do not paper over:** no customer-embedded delivery; no multi-agent/RAG production systems; no Bedrock/AgentCore.
- **Downplay:** Security Champion (JD has no security requirement — CLAUDE.md default is OMIT); semiconductor domain depth beyond the ML-inference story.
- **User directives:** none given for this JD.

## Critique Context
- **Reviewer persona:** an AWS FDE hiring manager staffing a brand-new org at speed — pragmatic, bar-raiser-trained, scanning for "can this person build *and* operate under customer pressure."
- **Amazon-specific:** Leadership Principles matter. *Ownership*, *Bias for Action*, *Dive Deep*, *Deliver Results* are the ones his evidence genuinely supports. Amazon interviews are LP-heavy — worth noting for interview prep, not for resume prose.
- **Domain vocabulary:** forward deployed, production-grade, end-to-end ownership, foundation models, Bedrock, agentic workflows, evaluations, guardrails, observability, latency/cost optimization, reference architectures, PFR.
- **Likely first technical challenge:** *"Walk me through an AI system you took to production."* The honest answer is BS-1 (containerized ML inference, 24/7 fab) — classical ML, not LLM. Prepare that answer deliberately; do not let it drift toward implying LLM production ownership.

## Cover Letter Decision
- **YES**
- **Reason:** The resume cannot, on its own, explain why a Swisscom platform engineer is applying to an embedded customer-delivery role. That gap is visible on page one and will otherwise be resolved against him. A letter is the only place to address it directly and turn production ownership into the argument.
- **Information it adds beyond resume:** (1) the motivation for moving from internal platform work into forward-deployed delivery, stated plainly rather than disguised; (2) **hands-on Kiro use** — first-party AWS tooling named in the JD; (3) native German for DACH accounts; (4) travel/mobility willingness from a stable Swiss base.
- **Verified hook sources:** JD text (Kiro, AWS Transform, PFR mechanism); AWS FDE launch 2026-06-30 ($1bn, ~45-day embedded engagements); config.md verified GenAI toolchain (Kiro, Copilot, LiteLLM, custom GPTs).
- **Forbidden in the letter:** any phrasing implying prior customer-embedded or strategic-account delivery; any agent-orchestration claim.

## Resume Plan
- Summary: 2–3 lines — production ownership + AWS + ML-into-production
- Skills: 4–6 evidence-backed lines; AWS prominent; **no Bedrock, no LangGraph/CrewAI/ADK, no vector DB**
- Swisscom: SW-2, SW-3, SW-7, SW-1, SW-8 (integration framing only)
- Bosch: BS-1 (lead), BS-3, BS-4
- Earlier experience: VZ-1 or VZ-2 (distributed systems / CI/CD), FC-3 optional
- Total bullets: 11–14
- Impact evidence still needed: **all Swisscom metrics are `unverified`** — this remains the standing weakness across every package.

## Output Files
- JD (verbatim): `output/AWS_Senior_FDE_Zurich/JD_aws_senior_fde_zurich.txt`
- Resume: pending Phase 2
- Cover letter: pending (decision YES)
- Critique: pending

## Status
- Fit gate: **CLOSED — NO-GO 2026-08-18** (Phase 0 completed, then declined)
- Original gate result: **Phase 0 DONE 2026-08-18** — Adjacent, Evidence Fit 69/100, minimum-qual gate PASS, title-defining Gap disclosed, Channel Weak
- Phase 0: DONE
- Phase 1: **NOT STARTED — will not start.**
- Resume: not generated
- Cover Letter: not generated (CL decision was YES, but moot)
- Critique: n/a
