What I Actually Look For When Hiring Senior Engineers
Years of experience tell you almost nothing. These four signals have predicted success on my teams far better than any résumé line.
I have sat on both sides of enough interview tables to know how little the standard signals are worth. Twelve years of experience can mean twelve years of compounding judgement, or it can mean one year repeated twelve times. The title on the last badge tells you what a previous company needed, not what yours does.
Over time I narrowed my own assessment down to four things. None of them are technologies, and none of them can be crammed the night before.
1. Can they explain a decision they got wrong?
Every senior engineer has shipped something they regret. The ones worth hiring can walk you through it without defensiveness: what they believed at the time, what information they were missing, and what they would trade differently now. If someone cannot produce that story, either they have not owned anything consequential, or they are not being straight with you.
2. Do they ask about constraints before solutions?
Give a candidate a design problem and watch the first sixty seconds. Juniors start drawing boxes. Seniors start asking who the users are, how much traffic it takes, what the team already runs, and what happens when it breaks at 3am. The questions are the work.
The gap between a good engineer and a great one is rarely knowledge. It is knowing which problem is actually worth solving today.
3. Can they make a junior engineer better?
Seniority is leverage. A senior who ships twice as much code as everyone else but leaves no one stronger behind them is a bottleneck with good throughput. I ask candidates to teach me something — anything — and I watch whether they calibrate to what I already know.
4. How do they behave when they disagree?
- Do they argue the idea, or the person holding it?
- Do they change their mind when given new information, and say so out loud?
- Can they disagree, lose, and then commit to the decision anyway?
That last one decides whether a team of strong engineers becomes a strong team, or four people building four architectures in the same repository.
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