Tauseef FayyazA to Z
Glossary
Every concept in this sheet, plus the smaller terms it uses. Select a concept to open its card.
A
- A glue language
- One language you can write quickly and well for scripts, small services and data jobs.
- A typical week
- A rough picture of how the week splits for each role.
- Adjacent customer-facing roles
- Roles next to these three: implementation engineers set products up, professional services deliver paid projects, technical account managers look after big accounts, support engineers fix issues.
C
- Cloud basics
- Enough of one cloud to deploy a small service, store secrets, read logs and understand identity and access management (IAM) and private networks (VPCs).
D
- Debugging systems you did not build
- A method for finding faults in unfamiliar code and infrastructure: reproduce, narrow down, form one hypothesis, test it, repeat.
F
- Forward deployed engineer
- A software engineer who works inside a customer's organisation to build and ship working software on the customer's own systems and data, then feeds what they learn back to the product team.
G
- Git in a customer's repository
- Branching, small commits and pull requests in a repository with someone else's rules, reviewers and pipeline.
H
- HTTP and REST basics
- How programs talk over the web: a request with a method, URL, headers and body, and a response with a status code and body.
O
- One customer, many capabilities
- Palantir's framing of the difference: a product engineer builds one capability for many customers, while a forward deployed engineer builds many capabilities for one customer.
P
- Pre-sale and post-sale
- Pre-sale is everything before the contract is signed: discovery, demos, proofs of concept.
R
- Reading logs and traces
- Finding the lines, request IDs and timings that explain what a system did, across application logs, cloud logs and traces.
- Role comparison at a glance
- A side-by-side view of when each role works, what it produces and how it is measured.
S
- Sales engineer
- The technical partner of an account executive during a sale.
- Solutions engineer
- An engineer who designs how a customer will adopt a product: which parts they use, how it connects to their systems and what a first rollout looks like.
- SQL on someone else's data
- Reading an unfamiliar schema, profiling tables and answering questions with joins and aggregates, often in the customer's own warehouse.