Before you hire, see how I handle a system under pressure

Your next hire has to hold up when the system does not. These six areas show how I handle load, failure, enterprise demands and speed. Start with yours.

• Scalability

  A system scales as far as the resource its parts share, so I find that resource and measure time spent waiting for it apart from time spent working.

• Distributed Systems

  Most failures in a distributed system happen between its parts rather than inside them, so I design for what each part does when another one goes quiet, answers late or reaches for the same state.

• Enterprise Systems

  An enterprise system is held together by its controls, so I make each merge gate read the evidence it claims to read and give each person and service only the access its current work needs.

• Moving Fast

  When work moves fast, an approved plan is wrong in small factual ways by the time it is built. The fast path that stays correct is a builder who checks each premise against the code, keeps the plan’s intent, and writes down every place the plan was wrong and why.

• Human in the Loop

  A person in the loop is a throughput dependency, not only a safeguard. When every hold on landing work waits for that person, an autonomous system stops landing anything and looks healthy while it does, so it has to report what landed and what is waiting on someone.

• Founder Experience

  I have founded products and hired a team of engineers to grow one, and running them meant decisions engineering does not answer: who the product answers to, the smallest version people can try, whether they use it and pay for it, and what a no should trigger.

For the engineering practice behind these areas, see Backend & Platform Engineering and Automated Security Analysis and agentic red-teaming.