The kinds of things I look for in evaluating senior candidates are things like:
- Payments flow kept going down because of lack of reliability in our CI, so I rebuilt the job queueing system to get to 99% reliability
- Most of our business is outside of the US, so we invested in better CDN routing, got a 50% improvement in our web TTIs
- We weren’t able to deploy code often because of our monolith, so we moved to a service-oriented architecture in order to speed up development
If candidates can’t justify why a project happened and why it helped either the company or their team, then that candidate isn’t a senior engineer, they’re just someone taking marching orders.
