Who you are 5+ years as a backend or full-stack engineer with real production experience — you’ve watched systems run in the real world and fixed what breaks 2+ years leading engineering teams — you’ve grown people, driven delivery, and you know the difference between managing and developing engineers Experience shipping production AI systems — agentic architectures, orchestration, multi-step workflows, fallback and error logic; you think in workflows, not endpoints Real fluency with AI coding tools — not “familiar with,” genuinely fast with them Strong eval instincts — you define metrics, build test sets, and don’t ship until you can measure; evaluation frameworks are part of the architecture, not an afterthought Full-stack comfort — you move from the prompt to the RAG pipeline to the orchestrator to the backend and back; you go where the right solution is Experienced and passionate about managing and growing people — strong opinions, held loosely; you make space for different perspectives and help the people around you grow Honest communicator — you flag problems early, give direct feedback, and say what you actually think; experienced with engineering best practices (code reviews, testing coverage, agile methodologies) Grounded confidence — you trust your abilities, move forward with incomplete information, make a call, and own it; when you’re wrong, you update and move on Not a must but a great
