Real-world experience running production systems and SRE, Platform, or DevOps work Comfortable working across Kubernetes, CI/CD, databases, and backend services Strong experience with Kubernetes in production environments Experience with observability stacks (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar) Worked deeply with relational databases and SQL, including profiling and tuning Comfortable in at least one backend language (e.g., Python) Experience improving CI/CD pipelines Worked with infrastructure-as-code tools Thinks deeply about developer experience and reliability Cares about security, resiliency, and cost