Experience building and optimizing RAG systems in production.
Strong engineering fundamentals. Full-stack mindset, comfortable across AI, backend development, and cloud infrastructure. Python and/or TypeScript proficiency; depth matters more than stack. Dropped into an unfamiliar codebase, you're productive.
Hands-on AWS in production: 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.