Hiring Senior Engineers in India: What We Actually Look For

Indian engineering hiring is a noisy market. Resume keyword salad, inflated titles, take-home assignments that take 12 hours and prove nothing. Here's what we look for, signal we trust, and what we ignore.

Key takeaways

• Trust: track record of shipping (not just contributing), prose-writing ability, willingness to push back.
• Don't trust: years of experience, prestige of college/employer, LeetCode performance alone.
• Test: real work in their context, conversation about past decisions, code review of their code.

What we look for

Shipping history

Specifically: things they personally shipped that real users used, ideally with traffic or outcome data. "I built X" is too vague. "I built X, it has Y users, the architecture choice was Z because..." is the signal.

Prose ability

Can they write a one-page explanation of a technical decision that a non-engineer can follow? Senior engineering is 50% writing. If they can't, they aren't senior.

Willingness to push back

In the interview, present a flawed approach. Watch them. The ones who say "interesting, let me try that" are not what we want. The ones who say "I'd push back on that because..." are.

Curiosity about our problem

The candidates who research our customers, our stack, our challenges before the call, they're rare and they're worth a lot.

Reading and reviewing code

A senior engineer can read someone else's code and have a thoughtful opinion about it. We do code-reading exercises with real PRs.

What we don't trust

Years of experience as a number. Some 4-year engineers are better than some 12-year ones.

Prestige. Tier-1 college, FAANG employer, IIT, useful filters maybe, but not predictive of seniority.

LeetCode performance. Necessary but not sufficient. Solves a different problem than ours.

Long take-home assignments. They penalize candidates with families and jobs. They're also gameable.

Our process

1. 30-minute first call: signal check. Did they prepare? Do they ask good questions?
2. 60-minute technical conversation: their past projects, our problems, an open-ended design question. No coding.
3. Code review exercise: we share a PR from our actual codebase; they walk us through their review.
4. 90-minute pair-programming on a small task in our codebase. Paid.
5. Reference checks, we always do them.

What we recommend

Stop optimizing for screening throughput. Start optimizing for hires you won't regret in 6 months. The cost of a bad senior hire is enormous.

Common pitfalls

Hiring on potential without evidence. Trust the body of work.

Skipping reference checks. Always do them. Honest ones surface what interviews miss.

Over-indexing on culture fit. Important, but if everyone you hire thinks like you, you build mediocrity.

FAQs

How long does our process take? 2 weeks end-to-end. We don't go faster; we don't go slower.

How do you handle candidates who can't commit time? Async-friendly steps where possible. The pair-programming session is firm.

Pay rates? Senior engineers in India range widely, ₹35L-₹120L+ depending on level, location, and equity. We pay top quartile.

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