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How to hire engineers for strong judgment and taste

by Sage Lazzaro14 Jul 2026

Why engineering judgment matters more than ever and how leading companies are redesigning hiring to find engineers who can actually think.

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    • Judgment and taste are now the most important engineering hiring signals. AI handles execution; developers must evaluate what agents produce and make product decisions faster than ever.
    • The biggest red flag: candidates who can’t explain their decisions. Curiosity and nuanced thinking matter more than the answer itself.
  • Every software developer knows there is no objectively right way to build a system. There are always multiple solutions that are technically correct and would work, but at the same time, not all paths are created equal. Developers need to constantly think through tradeoffs.
  • generative models are trained to add new code – not so much to simplify and delete code. Developers need to bring strong judgment to ensure the agents don’t write overly complex code that will just create bloat and problems down the line.
  • What’s more, in addition to the responsibility for agents’ code, developers are also taking more ownership of products from-end-to-end.
  • Now that the lag from “here’s a spec” to “now write the code” has gone from weeks to hours, you can’t wait for decisions anymore, says Hsu. He believes engineers are more effective if they have the strong product sense and technical judgement to make more decisions themselves.
  • FDEs embed directly into customer organizations to develop and deploy customized technical solutions for the customer’s unique needs, so they have to be exceptionally thoughtful about their decisions and able to convey their reasoning to customers. “Our FDEs are on calls with customers constantly. They’re getting that feedback loop faster than anybody,”
  • FDEs are the hot new job in engineering, with postings for the role soaring more than 800% between January and September 2025, according to analysis by Indeed. Combined with the new hyper-fast speed of development and general shift toward engineers owning product outcomes from end-to-end, the widespread embracement of the FDE model is putting an increasing number of engineers in the driver’s seat.
  • “[FDEs] are also tasked with doing whatever it takes, even outside of the bounds of what a traditional product team would do, to make sure that the customer is successful,” says Behnke. “So that is another reason why taste matters so much. They are going to be making a lot of decisions that we’re going to have to live with for the next few years for that customer.”
  • the interview as a we have to do the thing here to prove something from your brain directly, as memorization, is just not as useful. I need to understand thinking,
  • he likes the idea of the candidate working through something on their own, bringing it back, and then having a conversation about it with them
  • Potential solutions to the latter could include providing temporary access to the team’s AI tools or covering a one-month subscription to a platform they need
  • Specifically, they task candidates to build a light product spec with agents, intentionally giving an open-ended prompt so they can see where the engineers go with it and the decisions they make along the way
  • he’s looking for curiosity, deep questioning, and nuanced thinking – and it’s more about the way they give an answer than the answer itself
  • if an engineer can’t explain why they made a design decision over an equally valid alternative, “that’s obviously a pretty huge red flag.
  • evaluation for taste and judgment requires the interviewer to bring strong judgement as well. While interviewers used to be able to focus more on the code, now they need to have deeper conversations, which means coming in with strong communication skills

Summary AI-generated

Summarised by an AI assistant when this source was saved. Double-check against the original.

In summary, AI automation elevates engineering judgment and product taste to the primary hiring signals, driving a shift toward evaluating candidates' reasoning processes and the rapid growth of roles like Forward Deployed Engineers who own end-to-end customer outcomes.

  • Judgment and taste are now the critical hiring signals as AI handles technical execution, requiring developers to evaluate agent output and make product decisions rapidly.
  • Companies are overhauling hiring processes by using open-ended take-home projects and analyzing AI prompt chains to assess how candidates think rather than what they memorize.
  • The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role is surging, emphasizing end-to-end product ownership and the need for strong technical taste in making high-stakes customer decisions.
  • Interviews are shifting away from memorization and perfect code toward evaluating a candidate's ability to ask questions, explain tradeoffs, and demonstrate their reasoning process.

Notes this inspired

Also cited by

  • + InterviewingGrowing

    Ability to demonstrate trade-offs. This is especially relevant in the AI era. Interviewing is hard: Its harder to prove someone that you can do something, than just doing the thing everyday.