Hiring for Quality: What We Look For

Most job posts say "5+ years of experience". Ours don't. Here's why.

Experience is a noisy signal

We've hired engineers with 10 years of experience who couldn't ship a small feature without supervision. We've hired interns who shipped production features in week three. Years tell you almost nothing about quality.

What we actually look at

1. A piece of work you're proud of. A side project, a fix to an open-source repo, a college project, a hackathon entry. Anything.
2. How you think. A 45-minute paired exercise on a real problem. We're not testing whether you remember leetcode — we're watching how you ask questions.
3. How you communicate. Can you explain a trade-off in two sentences? Can you say "I don't know" when you don't know?
4. How fast you learn. We give a take-home that uses a technology you've never touched, and watch how you approach it.

Why this works

It surfaces self-taught engineers, late-career switchers, and quiet over-performers who don't have the polished resume. They land — and they stay.

What a strong take-home actually looks like

We're not grading for a "correct" answer — most of our take-homes don't have one. What we're actually reading for:

• Did they ask clarifying questions first, or start typing immediately? Jumping straight to code on an ambiguous spec is a bigger red flag than a slow start.
• Did they leave a trail? A short note on what they'd do differently with more time tells us more than a polished but silent submission.
• Did they test their own work? Not necessarily formal unit tests — even a few manual checks noted in a comment shows the habit.

Where this breaks down

To be honest about the trade-offs: this process takes longer than a resume-and-leetcode filter, and it doesn't scale to hundreds of applicants per role. We accept that cost because the alternative — filtering on years of experience or credentials — has produced worse hires for us in the past. For high-volume roles we still do a lightweight initial screen; the paired exercise and take-home are reserved for candidates who clear that first bar.

What candidates tell us afterward

The most common feedback we get, even from people we don't hire, is that the process felt like a real preview of how we work — pairing, asking questions out loud, and reviewing trade-offs together — rather than a trivia test. That's intentional. If someone can't picture working with us after the interview, we've both learned something useful.

Want to talk?

See open roles on the careers page. Show us what you've built.