Archetypes

Productivity-Focused Generalist

This is a generalist engineer. They may have a variety of different technical backgrounds (back-end, systems, etc). Regardless of specialty, they have great productivity. They follow an iterative process. They are a coding machine. They are a move fast and break things programmer.

Linux Internals Engineer

This is an engineer who is comfortable working with Linux (or Unix-like) operating systems at a low level. They may have experience working on device drivers. They are comfortable thinking about scheduling, interrupts, file systems system calls. They can explain Spectre and Meltdown, and how they were mitigated.

Architecture/Design-Focused Generalist

This is a generalist engineer. They may have a variety of different technical backgrounds (back-end, systems, etc). Regardless of specialty, they have a strong focus on software architecture. They write clean, modular code. They do very well on software / OOP design problems. And they reason well about the interactions of complex systems.