• A track record of leading systems, not just features. You can point to platforms or services you designed whose decisions still hold up under load, change and time.
• Strong judgement on trade-offs. Cost vs. latency, build vs. buy, consistency vs. availability, velocity vs. debt — and you can explain your reasoning in a room of non-engineers.
• Demonstrable technical influence in your teams. RFCs, guilds, tech-demos, shared libraries, architecture forums — something that shows your reach.
• A mentoring habit. Named engineers whose careers moved because of your input. You already enjoy this work.
• Excellent written communication. Your docs, RFCs and postmortems teach people things. This matters as much as your code.

Nice to have • Deep AWS data-platform chops: Glue, Athena, MWAA, ECS/EKS, Iceberg/Parquet, lakehouse patterns. • High-throughput serverless design with auditability and exactly-once semantics. • Financial, credit or regulated-data background.