An architect who still writes code every week architect-only candidates with no recent hands-on build are a hard reject.
9 to 11 years engineering, with 3+ as a hands-on architect or tech lead on production AI or automation systems.
Real full-stack depth: React/Next + Node on the front, Python (FastAPI, LangChain/LlamaIndex) on the back, SQL plus a NoSQL store, and one cloud (Azure preferred).
They must have shipped LLM features into production
RAG, tool calling, evaluation harnesses, cost/latency trade-offs
and be able to describe a system they built and how they evaluated it.
Daily use of Claude Code, Copilot or Cursor with a repo or artefact to show.
They should also have operated what they built, not just shipped it, and be able to explain a design to a junior engineer and a CFO in the same afternoon.
Expect a short design doc or technical blog post as part of the submission.
Think product-company or AI-startup engineers, or consulting architects who never stopped building not pure architects, and not backend-only or frontend-only engineers.