5+ years of software development experience with a strong track record of designing, building, and operating scalable and high-performance services Strong architectural and design skills, able to architect robust solutions with minimal guidance Hands-on experience instrumenting and debugging performance issues across a full stack Practical knowledge of microservices, event-driven design, and distributed architectures Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (GCP preferably), Docker, and Kubernetes (e.g., GKE, Cloud Run) Expertise across relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL/AlloyDB, MongoDB, Redis) and data warehousing (e.g., BigQuery) Real-world experience with Pub/Sub messaging systems (e.g., Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Kafka) Ability to clearly articulate complex technical ideas to both technical and non-technical stakeholders Demonstrated ability to influence team's technical direction, drive consensus, and elevate engineering excellence