Mindset
Proactive and self-directed; identify problems before they're handed to you
Comfort with ambiguity and ownership. Engagements start underspecified by design. Closing that gap is the job
B2+ English, comfortable collaborating across distributed, multicultural teams
Client Engagement
You are willing to spend time understanding and doing someone else’s job on the client's side before you write a line of code
Credible with senior stakeholders — you can hold a redesign conversation with a BU head and a scoping conversation with a CTO, presenting outcomes to them
You can produce a scoped, phased delivery plan with clear deliverables, dependencies, and risks — and estimate what it will cost to build and to run
Technical depth
7+ years building and running production systems.
Solid AI/ML foundations. You understand what the models do well enough to reason about failure modes
Designed and shipped to production LLM applications and agentic workflows — not demos, not POCs, not notebooks
Agentic orchestration: multi-step workflows, graph-based orchestration, tool use, state management, and recovery from partial failure
Experience with LLM APIs (Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, or OpenAI) and agent frameworks.
Experience building and optimizing RAG systems in production
Strong engineering fundamentals — dropped into an unfamiliar codebase or language, you’re productive. Python and/or TypeScript proficiency; depth matters more than stack.
Experience in making and defending architectural trade-off decisions
Hands-on AWS production depth: Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore, Lambda, ECS, S3, SQS, ECR, or similar. GCP or Azure is a plus
Cloud-native delivery: containers, ECS or Kubernetes, IaC, and CI/CD applied to AI pipelines
You evaluate. You have built or owned an eval suite for a non-deterministic system, and you can explain what you measured, how you produced ground truth, and what gated a release
Model and agent monitoring, drift detection
Cost and latency discipline: model tiering, caching, and the ability to say what a workload costs to run before it runs
Hands-on production experience with the Claude ecosystem — Claude Code, CLAUDE.md, hooks, skills files. Spec-driven development — writing the intent, constraints, and acceptance criteria before you let an agent build — is a strong plus
MCP: you can say why an agent would prefer it to a REST integration. Having authored a server is a plus