# Critique: Aker BP ASA — Data Product Architect, AI-ready Data Products

**Date:** 2026-07-29
**Documents:** `e2e_akerbp_data_product_architect_resume.tex` (2pp), `e2e_akerbp_data_product_architect_cover_letter.tex` (1pp, 258 words)
**JD:** `jd_akerbp_data_product_architect.md` — verbatim FINN 469067315, retrieved 2026-07-29. **JD integrity: PASS.**

> **Reviewer-independence caveat.** This critique was produced by the same agent that generated the package. That is a real weakness. The most consequential findings in this application came from the user's own review pass (Pass 2), not from self-critique. Treat the scores below as directional; treat the Tier findings as the useful output.

---

## 1. Fit Verdict and Hard Gate

**Evidence Fit: 79/100 — Adjacent** (top of band, one point below Core)
**Hard gate: PASS**

| Dimension | Weight | Score | Note |
|---|---:|---:|---|
| Required qualifications | 35 | 33 | All Direct once Atlassian Compass closed the catalogue-platform gap |
| Core responsibilities | 25 | 15 | **Weakest.** Builds products inside a governance framework; the role authors one |
| Level and ownership | 15 | 10 | Staff IC → architect. Component/Application Owner titles are real; org-wide architecture authority is not |
| Recency and depth | 10 | 10 | SW-7 is current and directly on-topic |
| Domain/tool transfer | 10 | 7 | AWS vs their Microsoft/Cognite/Databricks stack; Compass is a real catalogue tool but not theirs |
| Practical constraints | 5 | 4 | English ✅, EEA work rights ✅, relocation + 4-day deadline |

**No hard-gate failure.** English-only, no Norwegian clearance, no sponsorship needed, Master's held, location accepted by user.

**Flagged, not failed:** `critique_framework.md` §1 lists "company-wide architecture authority" as a NO-GO trigger, and the JD does say "across the organization". Not scored as NO-GO because the JD places the role *alongside* a Data Product Governance Lead and a Data Catalogue Owner, and states training will be given. This is the honest stretch and it is why Core responsibilities scores 15/25.

---

## 2. Document Quality: 93/100 — Pass

| Dimension | Weight | Score | Assessment |
|---|---:|---:|---|
| Truth and provenance | 25 | 25 | Validator PASS on both documents. Every claim traces to a canonical ID. Scope discipline held: no "built the Data Mesh", no framework authorship, no Purview/Collibra/Alation, no Azure/Terraform/dbt/LangChain. |
| Information hierarchy | 20 | 19 | Employer/title/dates/location dominant; governance evidence leads Swisscom and Bosch. |
| Bullet evidence and impact | 20 | 16 | Specific and interviewable, but **no verified metric anywhere** — the single largest remaining weakness. |
| Relevance and terminology | 15 | 14 | Post-fix, JD vocabulary coverage is strong (see §4). |
| Skills evidence | 10 | 10 | Every listed skill now has a visible supporting bullet — including Applied AI, which did not before Pass 2. |
| Mechanics/readability | 10 | 9 | 2pp, no overfull boxes, no orphaned bullets, no "(continued)" header. Page 1 ~78% full by design. |

---

## 3. Channel Strength: **Weak**

Cold application. A named contact exists (Per Olav Marthinsen). Channel is the one variable that has been Weak across all thirteen applications in this repo and is not fixable by document quality.

---

## 4. ATS / Vocabulary Scan

Post-fix coverage of JD terminology:

| Present | Absent (accepted) |
|---|---|
| data products · data mesh · metadata · lineage · cataloguing · data quality · ownership · lifecycle · governance · discoverability · adoption · architecture · analytics · AI · automation · cloud · English · Norwegian | information architecture · semantic models · intelligent agents · "energy" |

The absent terms are either unevidenced (information architecture, semantic models) or would require claiming work not done. Correctly omitted rather than keyword-stuffed.

---

## 5. Reader Sequence

- **ATS:** **PASS.** Clean extraction; employer/title/date order verified via pdftotext.
- **Recruiter (10s):** **BORDERLINE → FORWARD.** Staff level, "Governed Data Products · Metadata · Data Mesh" in the headline, Compass named. Concerns are relocation and architect scope, both addressed in the letter.
- **Hiring manager (2min):** **MAYBE.** Production-grounded governance is genuinely attractive and rare. Framework authorship will decide it.
- **Technical reviewer (10min):** **CREDIBLE.** Expect immediate probing on setting standards across many teams, catalogue depth beyond Compass, ownership assignment, and how adoption is measured.

---

## 6. Competitive Read

**Obvious-fit competitor:** a Norwegian data architect who already owns a Collibra or Purview deployment, has authored data-product standards, and knows Cognite Data Fusion.

- **Dennis's advantage:** current hands-on delivery inside a company-wide Data Mesh, plus production accountability (Component Owner, on-call, data quality). He knows which standards survive production because he has lived under them.
- **Their advantage:** framework authorship, catalogue-tool ownership, Norwegian energy domain, Microsoft/Cognite fluency, no relocation friction.

---

## 7. Claim Audit

| Claim | Canonical | Safe? |
|---|---|---|
| Governed data products + metadata/lineage in Atlassian Compass, Data Mesh | SW-7 (updated 2026-07-29) | YES — practitioner scope, no platform ownership |
| Component Owner, Fulfillment ETL | SW-2 | YES |
| Migrated domains' pipelines to cloud-native architecture on AWS; contributed to wider programme | SW-1 | YES — object scoped to his domains, hedged verb on the programme |
| Data products with product owners / B2B stakeholders | SW-4 | YES |
| Domain-grounded LLM assistants, model selection, curated knowledge | SW-8 | YES — no fine-tuning, RAG or deployment claim |
| Application Owner: SLOs, vendors, coordinating adoption via docs/training | BS-3 | YES — "coordinating adoption" matches the canonical 3L variant; earlier "got genuinely adopted" was a causal overclaim and was removed in Pass 2 |
| Containerized ML inference into 24/7 fab | BS-1 | YES — integration claim only, no model-training claim |
| Spotfire co-ownership + TAF 2022 | BS-5 | YES — verified credential |
| Languages: German native, English fluent, Norwegian basic | identity.languages | YES |

**No unsafe claims.**

---

## 8. Tiered Improvements

### Tier 1 — found in this critique, **APPLIED**
1. **"Architecture" appeared nowhere** in a resume for an *Architect* role where "modern data architecture" is a required qualification. Fixed two ways, both canonical-backed: SW-1 now reads "onto a cloud-native architecture on Swisscom's AWS platform" (matches the experience-file variant), and the iSAQB certification is now spelled out as "Certified Professional for Software Architecture (CPSA)".
2. **No Languages line**, despite fluent English being a stated requirement and Norwegian being materially relevant to the relocation story. Added.
3. **"Catalogue" and "adoption" absent** though both are JD-central and both canonically supported. Added to the skills line and the BS-3 bullet respectively.

### Tier 2 — not actioned, by decision
- **No verified metrics.** All 21 canonical claims carry `metrics: unverified`. Asked twice; user has none to supply. Inventing them is forbidden. This remains the package's largest weakness and directly caps the Bullet-evidence dimension at 16/20.

### Tier 3 — cosmetic, rejected
- Page 1 bottom whitespace (~22%). `resume_reference.md` §4/§9 forbid adding content to reduce whitespace.
- Russian (basic) omitted from the Languages line: not relevant to the role, and volunteering it on a Norwegian continental-shelf application subject to a high-risk-country affiliation assessment adds noise for no benefit. Omitting a basic non-professional language is normal practice, not concealment. **User can override.**

---

## 9. Cover Letter

**Decision: KEEP.**

Adds three things the resume cannot: relocation intent with EEA work rights, genuine Norway history (Vizrt Bergen), and the practitioner-to-architect rationale. All hooks verified first-party (see session file hook table). One company reference only — `cl_reference.md` warns against spending a paragraph proving familiarity.

**Pass 2 corrected its most serious defect:** the sentence "I have not authored an enterprise governance framework myself" handed the reviewer a ready-made rejection rationale and violated the explicit ban on defensive gap lists in `cl_reference.md` and `ai_fingerprint_rules.md`. This was the same failure mode identified in the 2026-07-28 Google post-mortem and partly reproduced here. Now replaced with transferability-led phrasing that names the Governance Lead and Catalogue Owner collaboration from the JD.

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## 10. Mechanical Verification

- Canonical validator, both documents: **PASS — 0 warnings**
- Compile: resume **2 pages**, cover letter **1 page**, **no overfull/underfull boxes**
- pdftotext: employer / title / dates / location order correct
- Contact details and email (`dennis@thiessen.io`) correct per `config.md`
- Bullets: **12**; no orphans, no split subsections, no "(continued)" header
- Certifications listed once; Education template-locked and unmodified
- Forbidden terms confirmed absent: Azure, Terraform, dbt, LangChain, Purview, Collibra, Alation, "petabyte scale", French/Italian

---

## Recommendation

**Submit.** Document Quality 93/100 with no unsafe claims; Evidence Fit 79/100 Adjacent with no hard-gate failure. The residual risks — framework authorship, no energy domain, AWS vs their stack, no metrics — are evidence realities, not document defects, and no further editing pass will change them.

**Before submitting:** attach the diploma/grade transcript (explicitly required by the posting). Expect the high-risk-country affiliation assessment to surface the Tongji/Shanghai thesis; answer plainly.

**Highest-leverage action outside the document:** email Per Olav Marthinsen. Channel Strength has been Weak on every application in this repo, and it is the one variable never yet tested.
