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CAPABILITY ATLAS

What the work actually consists of.

Forward-deployed engineering described as 10 domains and 55 capability families — the shared vocabulary the curriculum teaches in, so a transcript is written in the same words the work is described in.

ONTOLOGY

0.1.0 · fde-benchmark-0.1.0

RELEASE MODE

Public draft

COVERED HERE

10 of 10 domains

This is a vocabulary, not a score. The ontology is a public draft: it issues no rating, ranks nobody, and produces no official numeric output. Training consumes it to describe what it teaches; it does not grade against it and does not issue benchmark evidence.

THE DOMAINS

Ten domains, weighted.

Weight is the ontology's own coverage weighting, not a difficulty rating and not a claim about any individual.

  1. 01

    Forward-Deployed Discovery and Problem Framing

    13%

    Discover, frame, prioritize, and contract consequential enterprise problems under ambiguity.

    6 capability families

    • Stakeholder Discovery

      Identify decision makers, operators, users, incentives, and conflicting perspectives.

    • Workflow and Constraint Discovery

      Observe the real workflow and surface technical, organizational, regulatory, and adoption constraints.

    • Problem Framing and Decomposition

      Turn ambiguity into testable problem statements, boundaries, and sequenced work.

    • Outcome Contract and Acceptance Criteria

      Define measurable outcomes, owners, baselines, acceptance criteria, and stop conditions.

    • Opportunity Sizing and Prioritization

      Compare value, feasibility, risk, build-versus-buy options, and whether AI is warranted.

    • Customer Trust and Expectation Management

      Create decision clarity while setting credible expectations about uncertainty and delivery.

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  2. 02

    Software and Systems Engineering

    12%

    Build, test, integrate, observe, and maintain reliable software and distributed systems.

    7 capability families

    • Programming and Code Quality

      Implement maintainable software with appropriate language, abstraction, and quality choices.

    • API and Service Design

      Design stable contracts, services, integrations, state boundaries, and failure behavior.

    • Data and Event Systems

      Engineer data models, pipelines, events, consistency, and lifecycle behavior.

    • Identity and Authorization Engineering

      Implement authentication, authorization, tenancy, secrets, and service identity boundaries.

    • Delivery Automation and Testing

      Build testing, continuous integration, deployment, and infrastructure automation appropriate to risk.

    • Observability and Reliability Engineering

      Design telemetry, service objectives, resilience, and operable failure modes.

    • Performance, Scale, and Debugging

      Diagnose complex behavior and improve latency, throughput, resource use, and scale.

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  3. 03

    AI-Native and Agentic Engineering

    15%

    Engineer AI and agentic systems with explicit evaluation, control, cost, and failure boundaries.

    8 capability families

    • Model Selection and Routing

      Choose and route models based on capability, risk, privacy, latency, cost, and deployability.

    • Prompt, Context, Retrieval, and Grounding

      Engineer context and grounding systems with measured retrieval and answer behavior.

    • Agent Decomposition, State, and Orchestration

      Decompose agent work, manage state and memory, and define recoverable orchestration.

    • Tool, Permission, and Action Boundaries

      Constrain tools, credentials, actions, escalation, and human approval around model behavior.

    • Structured Outputs and Deterministic Control

      Place deterministic validation and policy boundaries around probabilistic components.

    • AI Evaluation, Guardrails, and Red Teaming

      Define evals, failure taxonomies, safety controls, adversarial tests, and release thresholds.

    • AI Operations, Cost, Latency, and Observability

      Operate model systems with quality, drift, provider, latency, and cost telemetry.

    • Adaptation, Fine-Tuning, and Open-Weight Systems

      Apply adaptation or private/open-weight deployment only when evidence justifies it.

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  4. 04

    Architecture and Technical Judgment

    12%

    Make defensible system, boundary, migration, resilience, and reuse decisions.

    6 capability families

    • Current-State and Target Architecture

      Analyze the current environment and define a credible target state.

    • Tradeoff Reasoning and Decision Records

      Make and communicate traceable decisions under competing constraints.

    • Boundaries, Interfaces, and Integration

      Define ownership, data, service, platform, and integration boundaries.

    • Security, Resilience, and Failure Domains

      Design systems to contain failures and enforce security across trust boundaries.

    • Migration, Sequencing, and Technical Risk

      Sequence delivery and migration around dependencies, reversibility, and technical risk.

    • Reuse, Platform Judgment, and Productization

      Distinguish a point solution from a reusable platform or product capability.

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  5. 05

    Enterprise Readiness, Security, and Governance

    12%

    Move systems through privacy, security, risk, compliance, accessibility, and release controls.

    7 capability families

    • Privacy and Data Classification

      Classify data and apply privacy, minimization, residency, consent, and retention controls.

    • Identity, Secrets, and Access Governance

      Govern people, services, privileges, secrets, keys, and tenant access.

    • Threat Modeling and Secure SDLC

      Identify threats and carry security controls through design, build, test, and operation.

    • Compliance Translation and Auditability

      Translate obligations into testable controls and durable evidence.

    • AI and Model Risk Governance

      Govern model use, change, evaluation, third parties, human oversight, and residual risk.

    • Release, Continuity, and Production Readiness

      Meet change, acceptance, recovery, continuity, and operational-readiness controls.

    • Accessibility and Responsible Deployment

      Design accessible, job-relevant, transparent, and responsibly governed experiences.

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  6. 06

    Production Deployment and Operations

    18%

    Deploy, operate, remediate, and transfer systems with measurable service ownership.

    7 capability families

    • Deployment and Environment Readiness

      Prepare environments, dependencies, access, data, capacity, and release prerequisites.

    • Rollout, Rollback, and Production Acceptance

      Release safely with acceptance evidence, staged exposure, and tested rollback.

    • Service Objectives, Telemetry, and Reliability

      Operate against measurable objectives using actionable production telemetry.

    • Incident, Escalation, and Postmortem Practice

      Respond, communicate, learn, and remediate during consequential failures.

    • Model Quality, Drift, and Provider Failure

      Detect and contain quality degradation, drift, and model/provider failure.

    • Cost, Capacity, and Lifecycle Operations

      Manage cost, scale, lifecycle, upgrades, dependencies, and service sustainability.

    • Runbooks, Handoff, and Operational Ownership

      Transfer an operable system with clear ownership, escalation, and maintenance capability.

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  7. 07

    Business Outcomes and Value Realization

    8%

    Establish baselines, attribute value, measure persistence, and make scale or stop decisions.

    4 capability families

    • Business Case and Baseline

      Define the value hypothesis, baseline, costs, risks, and accountable outcome owner.

    • Metrics, Experimentation, and Attribution

      Measure effects and distinguish system contribution from unrelated change.

    • Value Persistence and Adoption

      Evaluate whether benefits and operating behaviors persist after rollout.

    • Scale, Iterate, Stop, and Outcome Communication

      Use outcome evidence to recommend scaling, iteration, or stopping and explain why.

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  8. 08

    Forward-Deployed Communication and Leadership

    7%

    Lead decisions, negotiate constraints, communicate clearly, and transfer capability.

    4 capability families

    • Executive, Customer, and Engineering Communication

      Communicate decisions and evidence at the appropriate altitude for each audience.

    • Negotiation, Conflict, and Decision Clarity

      Resolve requirement conflict, push back responsibly, and make decisions explicit.

    • Delivery Ownership Under Pressure

      Maintain judgment, escalation, accountability, and customer trust under delivery pressure.

    • Mentoring, Capability Transfer, and Product Feedback

      Enable teams and convert field learning into reusable organizational or product capability.

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  9. 09

    Modernization and Transformation

    3%

    Decompose legacy constraints and sequence technical and operating-model transformation.

    2 capability families

    • Legacy Discovery, Dependencies, and Decomposition

      Discover legacy behavior and decompose systems around risk, seams, and dependencies.

    • Migration, Platform, and Operating-Model Transformation

      Sequence migration, data, platform, adoption, and governance as one transformation.

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  10. 10

    Domain Specialization

    DOMAIN PACK

    Optional domain packs reported separately from the vendor-neutral core score.

    4 capability families

    • Healthcare AI

      Healthcare-specific workflow, safety, privacy, interoperability, and clinical governance.

    • Contact-Center AI

      Customer-service workflow, channel, quality, workforce, and operational deployment depth.

    • AI Infrastructure and Model Operations

      Accelerator, inference, private deployment, model-serving, and model-operations depth.

    • Regulated Enterprise AI

      Financial-services, public-sector, and other high-control enterprise deployment depth.

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Ontology source · SamSnead85/lockedin-fde-benchmark · f137f0828a8e · consumed, not issued