Measurable impact shipped → Initiatives launch with defined success metrics and honest post-launch analysis — and by the end of your second quarter, your team's work has visibly moved metrics the business cares about.

A faster, more autonomous team → The team ships measurably faster than when you joined, engineers deliver end-to-end without you in every decision, and your reports are visibly leveling up.

Quality by design → Quality and performance don't erode as the team ships — SLOs guard them, feature work stays balanced against maintenance, bugs get addressed instead of accumulating, and UX improves proactively.

Architecture that holds → Your design decisions hold up as the product grows — new features get easier to build, not harder, and design flaws get caught in review, not production.

A track record of leading engineers. 8+ years building software, including leading a team — formally or informally — and growing the engineers around you. This is the core of the role.

Strong architecture and code review. This is how you lead — you set technical direction and strategy through sound system design and give the kind of code review that makes engineers better, spotting risk and design flaws before they ship.

Full-stack technical judgment. Deep enough knowledge across mobile, web, and backend to review across the stack and evaluate what your team builds — even where you're not the one writing it.

Deep iOS expertise. You've built and shipped production iOS apps with real depth (Swift/SwiftUI) — it's our lead platform and where most of our customers are — with solid Android (Kotlin/Jetpack) alongside. It's the technical foundation this role builds on.

Stakeholder management and expectation setting. You partner cross-functionally with product, design, marketing, and partners — communicating trade-offs and keeping everyone aligned as priorities shift.

A product and business mindset. You prioritize business objectives and measure success by value delivered — what moves the metrics — not by raw output or precise task estimates.

Prioritization in a high-demand environment. With more good ideas than capacity, you triage competing requests, sequence against capacity, and say no well.

High-traffic product sense. You've worked on consumer products at scale (e-commerce or similarly demanding), and you care about performance, reliability, and the customer experience that flows from them.

AI fluency, clear written communication, and a collaborative default. You share context freely and disagree-and-commit when it's time to move.