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, collaborative; 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.
Strong modern engineering habits: testing strategy, observability, CI/CD mindset, maintainability.