What you'll need 6+ years building production-grade backend systems that real users depend on Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features to production, including honest reckoning with non-determinism, hallucination, and cost An evaluation mindset - you don't call a change "better" without a measurement, and you're comfortable with the statistics that back that claim A track record of debugging distributed systems in production, and the discipline to find root cause across service boundaries Fluency with agentic coding tools like Claude Code or Cursor, including the habit of treating AI-generated code with a senior reviewer's skepticism The ability to pull your own numbers, design your own experiments, and measure your own impact Ready to work in an office environment most days of the week
