Strong Rust. You've shipped Axum or comparable async services to production.
You know what 'static lifetimes mean in practice and you don't fight the borrow checker — you collaborate with it.
Solid React 18 with TypeScript strict. You write hooks idiomatically, you understand provider composition, and you don't reach for a state library when Context is sufficient.
SQL fluency. MySQL specifically is a bonus; experience with sqlx::query!-style compile-time-verified queries is a bonus on top of that.
Comfort owning a wire contract — meaning you treat API_REFERENCE.md as the source of truth and you update it in the same commit as the code change. You understand why this matters across two repos with two CI pipelines.
Production discipline: you write structured logs, you reason about what gets INFO'd vs DEBUG'd, you don't leave panics on hot paths, you don't unwrap() on user input.
Strong bonus:
You've integrated against broker APIs before — REST + streaming, OAuth2 + static keys, the whole experience.
You've worked on a fintech platform that handles real customer money and you have opinions about why floats are bad for prices, how to design idempotent order submission, and how to think about partial fills.
You've operated CFTC/NFA-regulated infrastructure or you have read enough of the rulebook to understand what compliance auditors will ask about.
You're comfortable with GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, Caddy or Cloud Load Balancer).
You've worked with multi-broker order routing or aggregation.
You'd be a poor fit if:
You want to "modernize the stack" before you understand why it's chosen the way it is.
You'd rather start over than read 5,000 lines of someone else's Rust.
You write financial logic in floating-point and "round at the end."
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