Engineering management at depth. You've managed engineers building and running production systems, and you can speak to the teams you've grown, the delivery you've owned, and the performance calls you've made.
Technical range across both domains. You needn't be the deepest expert in either, but you hold your own with senior engineers on both sides: integration and API design, identity and SSO, and third-party systems on the CTI side; reliability, observability, incident response, and SLOs on the S&O side. You can steer a design review, challenge an estimate, and make a sensible build-versus-buy or sequencing call. This isn't a hands-on coding seat, but it is an engineering one.
Delivery through ambiguity. You've kept teams shipping when the structure wasn't fixed, and can talk to how you balanced pace, quality, and people.
You grow people. Engineers you've coached, mentored, or levelled up, and a real preference for people leadership as the job.
AI-native by default. You work with AI tooling day to day and expect your engineers to, and you can tell AI-assisted speed from AI-shaped slop.