Distributed Systems Depth: Deep, hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale. You have solved real problems in sharding, replication, consistency, load balancing, and concurrency, not just studied them
Observability Data Experience: Experience building or operating large-scale data infrastructure such as time-series databases, log aggregation, streaming pipelines, or distributed tracing backends. Familiarity with technologies like Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Kafka, Vector, or similar
Technical Proficiency: Strong programming fundamentals in Go or another modern compiled language (Go strongly preferred). Comfort with Kubernetes, microservices, and CI/CD as the operating environment for everything you build
Design Judgment at Staff Level: You proactively scope ambiguous problems, surface non-functional requirements without being prompted, and reason about tradeoffs in terms of customer and business outcomes, not just technical elegance
Operational Mindset: On-call experience on a customer-facing service. You treat incidents as design feedback and systematically eliminate the conditions that cause them
Cross-Functional Influence: A track record of driving technical outcomes that span team boundaries, and the communication skills to bring product, support, and adjacent engineering teams along
Mentorship: You make the engineers around you better through design guidance, thoughtful review, and honest, constructive feedback
Professional Experience: 8+ years of software development experience, with sustained ownership of production distributed systems