19 years building distributed systems that process 22 billion events/day, cut latency by 40%, and scale 12x without breaking a sweat. I've led platform engineering at AlphaSense, OpenGov, and Acquia — and I've been on both sides of Staff+ interviews. I know exactly what panels look for and where candidates leave points on the table. If you're a mid-level engineer aiming for Senior/Staff, a founder architecting your first data platform, or a team lead trying to get Kafka and Flink right, you're in the right place. No fluff. No generic advice. Real war stories, real tradeoffs.