A. Seniority & Role Fit (NONNEGOTIABLE)
8–10+ years total software engineering experience
Senior / Technical Lead Individual Contributor (not manager)
B. Enterprise Environment Experience
Has worked in large enterprise environments
Reject if experience is limited to:
C. Production AI (THIS IS THE #1 FILTER)
Productiondeployed AI (not POCs)
Handson with: Agents and/or RAG , Orchestration workflows
Experience with: Monitoring & logging, Performance, latency, reliability, Debugging production issues
Reject if: Only chatbots and "AI” listed in resume with no operational depth
D. HandsOn Engineering Depth
Personally writes, deploys, and debugs code
Can walk through:
Reject if candidate only:
E. CloudNative & Tooling (Must Be Explicit)
APIs / microservices
Containers (Docker / Kubernetes) or serverless
CI/CD pipelines
Infrastructure as Code
Monitoring / observability tools