- 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