As I am building out my agentic AI team, about half my time is being spent on hiring great technical talent. I thought it’s a good idea to explain what I look for at a high level for the four roles that I am hiring the most
Hopefully this gives you an idea of what I look for at a high level in each role. It’s not an exhaustive list. I am not listing basic competence needed in each role at all – someone else will usually evaluate all that before you and I will have a chat.
I hope this helps you qualify if you are a good fit for these roles. If you do think you are a fit – we would love to talk to you. It’s a great team and we are fun to hang with and we do a lot of cool stuff that the biggest companies in the world benefit from.
Great engineers
They are great craftsmen – not just creating code that works, but code that lasts. They understand that their work doesn’t exist in isolation – others need to work with it. While they are curious about technology, they are pragmatists. For example – they are not religious about always designing for horizontal scaling and will happily start with vertical scaling that is simpler and faster if that’s all the problem needs for a good solution.
They write good documentation that lets others understand their rationale. They don’t wait for QA to find issues – they take pride in testing and spend the time thinking about corner cases.
Great engineering managers
There was a point in time when I was a half decent engineer (maybe with the exception of writing great documentation) . I struggled as a leader of an engineering team though. Later in my career I observed that this was quite common – and it’s no different in sales. Great sales people don’t automatically became great sales leaders, and great sales leaders don’t automatically turn into great P&L leaders.
It’s a hard transition when you shift focus from managing code to managing people who often are way smarter than you.
If any role in a technical team needs to be good at politics – engineering managers are the ones that need it. They need to be able to find resources for their team to succeed and shield their team from EM organizational craziness. There were days in my life where I truly just wanted to go back to being a technical hero and not deal with product managers and sales people and CFOs.
EM needs more EQ than IQ. Great engineers are a diverse lot – some need to be left alone, some need active coaching, and some will burn out if you don’t keep checking in to course correct. It’s a tiring job and you need to thrive in that environment
They need to be communication wizards – negotiating with product managers to translate the roadmap into things that can be coded, while also explaining to finance why you need budget to tackle technical debt.
I have always felt that it’s easier for an EM to learn basic business than to teach tech to other stakeholders. I have often felt my MBA was wasted effort but grudgingly I will accept that it helped me explain tech better to others in a language they can follow.
My boss BK keeps telling us “candor over comfort” is how we should operate. This is critical for EM . There are very few days without hard conversations in this role
Great architects
A few technologists need to step back and use wide angles lens to look at problem statements and solutions – that’s the architecture profession.
There is no such thing as perfection in architecture- it’s a series of tradeoffs. You have to balance what is needed today vs long term sustainability. Architects are not philosophers – they have to weight pros and cons and come to a decision. Poor architects are quite easy to spot – they throw around a lot of jargon and never take a hard decision. Great architects are harder to find easily – their work looks boring because everything just works.
No one can predict the exact future – architects are not prophets. But what they need to do is to make sure that software is written in such a way that the next requirement won’t force a complete rewrite.
Unlike EM – architects don’t usually have big teams and often are individual contributors. They have very limited direct authority. So they need to influence decisions via their clarity, with prototypes and with solid technical rationale. Architects who preach from an ivory tower lose the respect of engineers really quickly.
Architects need a detailed understanding of the business problem they are solving – the job is to identify capabilities and design solutions for them that accelerate the delivery of those to the business.
Great product managers
Some of my PM friends don’t like me saying this – but I like PMs to be the CE”No” of the team. They have to say NO to a lot of things and ruthlessly prioritize.
While engineers and architects are tasked to build the solution the right way, product managers are the ones making sure that it’s the right solution that is being built. They are the connective tissue that makes it all work. Engineers take care of the HOW – PM takes care of the WHAT and WHY.
Saying NO to powerful people js not easy. You need clear frameworks to make decision – and those frameworks need to be data driven. That in turn means you need to understand what adds value to your clients and what moves the needle for your business.
The viability of a product is not just determined by the coolness of technology used to build it. Yes agentic AI is super cool and you need to know how it works – but even more important is understanding how the intersection of UX, regulations, GTM, pricing etc work
Much like I mentioned about architects – this is a role that is low on authority because they don’t manage big teams. They influence with clear thinking and market insights.
And Vijay Says... 