5+ years in a production engineering role shipping customer-facing software. Solutions engineering or consulting backgrounds qualify if you were writing and deploying production code, not just scoping it
Fluency in wide range of programming languages (Javascript/Node, Typescript, Python, etc)
Experience building and operating real-time systems: WebSockets, streaming media, event-driven architectures, or high-throughput API services
Production integration work with CRM platforms (Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar) or data warehouse/lake connectors (Snowflake, Databricks, S3)
Have built retrieval and ingestion paths that feed agents reliable context with correct guardrails & caching in place
Working knowledge of data engineering patterns: ETL/ELT pipelines, data quality checks, ingestion from heterogeneous sources
Comfort with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP): containers, CI/CD, monitoring, and basic security practices
Strong client-facing communication: you can run a technical working session with a customer’s IT team and translate what you learn into engineering decisions
Startup disposition: you build, you ship, you fix what breaks. Low ego, high agency
Voice or telephony infrastructure experience: building or operating real-time call systems at scale
LLM orchestration and agentic system design: prompt engineering, function calling, structured output, guardrails
Experience with workflow engines, rules engines, or state machine architectures
Product sensibility: you think about user experience, not just system architecture. You’ve influenced product direction through technical insight