About the role
Requirements:
- Strong hands-on backend engineers: Still coding and owning implementation, not primarily architecture/people/project leadership.
- Strong in concurrency and multithreading: Candidates should have real experience reasoning about race conditions, shared state, synchronization/locks, atomic operations, thread safety, concurrent request handling, etc.
- Strong distributed-systems fundamentals: Experience building/owning systems involving routing, service discovery, caching, fault tolerance, health checks, retries/timeouts, queues or event-driven systems, horizontal scaling, etc.
- Strong problem decomposers: Able to take an ambiguous problem, establish requirements/assumptions, define a clean design, and get to a working first milestone independently.
- Good implementation judgment: Should be able to prioritize an MVP and iterate rather than over-engineering or getting stuck in infrastructure/plumbing details.
- Strong data-structure/state-management fundamentals: Particularly around maintaining consistency across concurrent reads/writes and avoiding multiple conflicting sources of truth.
- For screening, please probe specifically for examples where the candidate personally designed and implemented a concurrent/distributed backend component, and ask them to explain the concurrency/failure scenarios they had to handle.
- Please avoid over-indexing on titles like "Senior/Staff Engineer" or keywords like "distributed systems" alone. We need candidates who can demonstrate depth through actual hands-on ownership and implementation.
- The key SDE3 signal we're looking for is: can independently take a complex backend problem from requirements, design, and implementation to a working solution while making sound concurrency and system-design decisions without significant hand-holding. A few patterns have come through from the recent SDE3 interviews, so I'd like to tighten the search criteria.