You ship. You’ve built useful, mission-critical tech.
You’re comfortable owning the whole loop: design → code → test → deploy → operate → learn.
You think in systems: contracts, boundaries, failure modes, and cost/perf trade-offs.
You communicate clearly and crisply (design docs/ADRs, postmortems) and raise the bar in code reviews.
Proof of impact. Years and logos don’t impress us. Results do. If you have 4–6+ years, great; if you’ve built more in 2 than most do in 10, even better.