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