- Experience leading 5–10 engineers (or equivalent), collaborating across squads, and driving pragmatic decisions.
- Bias to simplicity and fast execution over big enterprise architecture and heavy design up front—while maintaining quality.
- Personality: calm, clear, direct, cooperative; coaches teams and raises the bar (not command-and-control). People management is a plus but not mandatory.
- Hands-on recently / tech areas
- Must show recent hands-on involvement (last 12–24 months): code reviews, architecture trade-offs, incident/postmortem leadership, performance/reliability improvements, integration work, etc.