Skills and Day-to-Day Work

Technical skills

• Strong general programming (Python and TypeScript are most common), SQL and data modelling.
• Integration engineering: REST and GraphQL APIs, OAuth and SSO, webhooks, file and database integrations, rate limits, retries and idempotency.
• Data work: cleaning messy customer data, ETL, schemas, data quality checks.
• Cloud and deployment: containers, cloud networking basics, secrets, logging, and deploying into customer VPCs or on-premises environments.
• AI systems (increasingly): prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation and guardrails.
• Debugging in unfamiliar environments where you can't attach a debugger or see everything.

Human skills

• Discovery: finding the real problem behind a feature request.
• Communication: explaining trade-offs to engineers, managers and executives; writing clear status updates.
• Prioritisation and saying no without damaging the relationship.
• Ownership: customers see you as "the person who makes it work".

How the work is organised

Typically one or a few strategic customers at a time, a deployment plan with milestones tied to customer outcomes, frequent check-ins, and a loop back to product: bugs, missing features and patterns seen across customers.

skills = {"programming": 4, "integrations/APIs": 3, "data cleaning/SQL": 4, "cloud & deployment": 2,
          "AI/RAG/evals": 2, "discovery": 3, "communication": 4, "prioritisation": 2}
target = 4
print("self-assessment (1-5), biggest gaps first:")
for skill, level in sorted(skills.items(), key=lambda kv: kv[1]):
    gap = target - level
    print(f"  {skill:20} {level}/5 {'*' * level}{'.' * (5 - level)}" + (f"  gap {gap}" if gap > 0 else ""))

self-assessment (1-5), biggest gaps first:
  cloud & deployment   2/5 **...  gap 2
  AI/RAG/evals         2/5 **...  gap 2
  prioritisation       2/5 **...  gap 2
  integrations/APIs    3/5 ***..  gap 1
  discovery            3/5 ***..  gap 1
  programming          4/5 ****.
  data cleaning/SQL    4/5 ****.
  communication        4/5 ****.