Experience leading multi-person or multi-team projects Deep systems experience: built or scaled distributed, high-throughput, low-latency systems Strong with compiled languages (Go, Rust, C++, Scala, or Java) Architectural ownership: design clean interfaces, modular service boundaries, scalable deployment patterns Operational maturity: understand observability, alerting, reproducibility, CI/CD, and infrastructure Mentorship and leadership skills Startup mindset: balance strong technical standards with pragmatism