• Design and build secure, scalable full-stack services using AWS serverless tech (Lambda, SQS, API Gateway) — with real attention to event-driven patterns and observability, not just "does it work on my machine."
• Own your services in production. That means building good observability, keeping an eye on alerts, and responding to them before they become bigger problems.
• Build infrastructure as code with AWS CDK and push for CI/CD that ships safely and often — not "big bang" releases you have to pray over.
• Design RESTful APIs other teams will actually want to consume: clear contracts, sane versioning, no surprises.
• Write tests — unit, integration, end-to-end — as part of how you build, not a chore you do after.
• Show up to architecture discussions with opinions and documentation, not just vibes.
• Use AI tools to move faster on coding, debugging, testing, and research — but you're still the one who validates the output.

These are the essentials you'll need to get an interview

• 2-3 years of professional software engineering experience in an agile, full-stack-focused environment.
• Solid full-stack fundamentals: request lifecycles, data persistence, error handling, and code other humans can read. Comfortable in Node.js/TypeScript and SQL.
• Real REST experience — you know what makes an API well-designed, not just what makes it "work."
• A testing mindset: you understand why unit, integration, and end-to-end tests each earn their keep.
• Cloud awareness (AWS preferred) — you get managed services, scalability, and what it means to actually own infrastructure.
• CI/CD fundamentals — you've shipped to production frequently and lived to tell about it.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code concepts; hands-on with Terraform, AWS CDK, or similar is a bonus, not a gate.
• An AI-native work style — you use these tools to move faster and know how to judge what they hand you.
• An ownership mindset — you follow through from code to deployment to "is this still working right."
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