Hiring devs in the AI era

A few weeks ago, we hosted a CTO event in Barcelona, and one of the topics that came up was hiring. A few months before that, Ilya, CTO at Factorial, also gave a talk in the community about what they look for when hiring engineers.

My takeaway from both conversations: To design interviews, we first need to reflect on how the role of the developer is changing.

Ticket implementation -> Product engineering

Coding is not enough. This was already true before, but now it matters even more. We need engineers who understand the business, the product, and the users. People who can think, design, and implement end to end.

Why? Because...

IC -> Agent manager

Developers are no longer just individual contributors. They now have access to many agents capable of generating code that would have taken months to write manually.

Their job is becoming more about coordinating them, reviewing them, creating guardrails, giving them the right context, and, most importantly...

Writing code -> Reviewing code

Reviewing. The bottleneck has moved from writing code to reviewing it.

We still need technically strong engineers who can detect mistakes, risks, and opportunities for improvement in AI-generated code. But we also need them to do it while keeping the product, customer, and business context in mind.

I'm not proposing one specific interview strategy. I think many different approaches can work. But whatever process we use, we should make sure we are testing for these shifts.