Backend depth: Comfortable leading non-trivial work in modern PHP (7/8+) - Object-Oriented Design, testability, and the trade-offs of common patterns are second nature.
Frontend competence: Can ship production React/TypeScript features end-to-end without supervision.
Scale experience: You’ve worked on high-traffic web applications and understand what breaks at scale - database hotspots, caching, queueing, idempotency, observability.
Relational databases: Practical experience with MySQL or similar - you can read an EXPLAIN plan and fix a slow query without guessing.
Integration work: Experience designing and consuming HTTP APIs, including handling the messy realities of third-party reliability.
AI-assisted development: You use modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar) as part of your daily workflow - and you have a healthy scepticism of their output. You can tell when the model is bluffing and you don’t merge code you don’t understand.
Product partnership: Can work with Product Managers to refine requirements, push back constructively, and give honest estimates.
Communication: Can explain technical decisions to non-engineers and write clearly enough that async collaboration actually works.
Judgment: Strong problem-solving, attention to detail, and the instinct to ask “do we actually need this?” before adding complexity.