• You have experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production
• You take ownership end-to-end - prototype, test, ship, monitor, and iterate
• You're comfortable with consensus, coordination, and the realities of distributed failure modes
• You think in terms of data flow, state, performance, and correctness, and you can reduce complex systems into understandable components
• You value clear communication, practical engineering, and building systems that others enjoy working with
• Go fluency — if you haven't written Go yet, you've been meaning to
• Hands-on experience with pub/sub, RPC, or coordination systems (NATS, etcd, Raft, Paxos)
• Exposure to real-time or low-latency infrastructure — you know what microseconds feel like
• You've shipped observability tooling you'd actually want to use (tracing, metrics, at-scale logging)
• In those school group projects, you did most of the work (:sigh:)