How close are you to an AI engineer contract in energy trading?

Answer 20 questions and a few about yourself, in about five minutes. You'll see which of the things the job adverts ask for you have already done, which you haven't, and what to work on first. It measures experience, not ability.

I'm Jordan Dimov. I built position and P&L systems across six trading desks at Shell, and I have put AI agent systems into production.

I teach energy trading and trading systems to a paying community of engineers and analysts. The library behind it is more than thirty guides I wrote myself, on how the markets, the desks and the systems work.

In the last six months UK contract adverts that mention AI agents passed a thousand. The trading ones ask for something most AI engineers lack: knowledge of how a trading desk works. (IT Jobs Watch: 1,002 adverts in the six months to 12 November 2026, across every sector.)

I offer paid private tuition to a small number of people each quarter. Some people who take this are told they don't need it, and some that it is too early.

Python and engineering

Answer for what you have done, not for how confident you feel.

1. Have you written Python that other people or systems depend on every day?
2. Do you write automated tests for your own code?
3. Have you built or changed an API or a service (FastAPI, Flask or similar)?
4. Is your work reviewed through Git pull requests?

LLM APIs, structured outputs and tool calling

Answer for what you have done, not for how confident you feel.

5. Have you called an LLM API (OpenAI, Claude, Azure OpenAI) from your own code?
6. Have you made a model return structured output that your code then checked (a JSON schema or Pydantic)?
7. Have you given a model tools to call (function calling) and handled the calls in code?
8. Have you built an agent loop yourself, without a framework?

RAG, knowledge graphs and agent frameworks

Answer for what you have done, not for how confident you feel.

9. Have you built retrieval over documents (RAG)?
10. Have you measured whether your retrieval found the right passages?
11. Have you modelled data as a graph (Neo4j or similar) or used GraphRAG?
12. Have you built a workflow in LangChain or LangGraph, or connected a tool over MCP?

Evaluation, guardrails and production

Answer for what you have done, not for how confident you feel.

13. Have you written a test set with known answers and scored a model against it?
14. Have you built a guardrail: code that stops an AI doing something it should not?
15. Have you built a step where a person approves an AI's action before it happens (human-in-the-loop), with a record of who approved what?
16. Have you deployed an AI application that other people use (on Azure, AWS or in-house), with logging and cost tracking?

Trading knowledge and proof

Answer for what you have done, not for how confident you feel.

17. Could you explain to an interviewer how a position and its P&L are worked out for a power or gas book?
18. Have you worked in or beside a trading system (Endur, Allegro or one built in-house)?
19. Have you used AI on a real business problem for an employer or client, with their permission?
20. Could you open your laptop today and walk an interviewer through an AI system you built?

About you

These are not scored. They tell me who is asking.

21. Which best describes you?

One or two lines.

23. What have you tried so far? Tick any.

Paying and timing

24. If you took private tuition, who would pay?
25. How soon do you want to move?

Optional. Add your LinkedIn profile if you'd like me to read it.

Private tuition

27. Each quarter I take twelve people for three months of private tuition. It is £14,800 + VAT. Would you like to be considered?

Where I can write to you

You asked to be considered, so I need an address to write to. Your result comes next either way.

Your answers come to me and nobody else. They are deleted 12 months after you send them, or sooner if you ask. Privacy policy.