10+ years of experience as a backend or platform engineer building and operating large-scale, distributed systems Proven track record in leading technical direction for complex systems Strong experience designing and evolving public or internal APIs (REST/gRPC/GraphQL) Experience driving cross-team initiatives Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals Hands-on experience with observability, performance tuning and designing systems that are safe to change and easy to debug Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical partners Experience mentoring senior engineers and helping teams uplevel their system design and API design skills Experience with Ruby / Rails, event-driven architectures, MySQL at scale, or previous work on internal platform or infrastructure teams (nice to have)