How do you vet a Lead Backend Engineer when AI makes everyone sound senior?

Danny — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 23:22:38 +0000

I’m trying to hire a Lead Backend Engineer for our team of 15, and the usual ways of evaluating candidates don’t feel reliable anymore. We developed an enterprise saas and need to expand as we grow and the struggle is real for me as the project owner/exec who oversees everything. I have asked my team for referrals but seems everybody has an angle of who they want to bring in.

AI has flattened the signal:

resumes all look polished
technical answers sound perfect
take-homes are easy to outsource
GitHub isn’t representative for most engineers

I’m not trying to filter for trivia or clever algorithms. I’m trying to figure out who has actually dealt with real production problems—messy data, weird bugs, performance bottlenecks, half-rewritten systems, tradeoffs under pressure, etc.

Here’s what I’m struggling with:

System design interviews feel too “textbook.”
People give confident, generic answers that don’t reflect real constraints.
Asking about past projects is hit or miss.
Strong engineers go deep; others stay vague. AI is getting better at sounding deep.
Code tests don’t show judgment.
They show whether someone can complete tasks, not whether they can lead or review code.

What I want to understand is simple:

How do they reason about tradeoffs?
How do they review imperfect code?
How do they debug something when logs are useless?
How do they push back when a solution is bad?
These are the parts of the job that are hardest to fake—and hardest to measure.

So I’m asking the dev.to community:

If you've hired senior engineers recently, what actually worked for you?
What interview formats or signals helped you separate real experience from polished answers?

I’d appreciate any advice from people who’ve been on either side of this.

Forem: Danny

How do you vet a Lead Backend Engineer when AI makes everyone sound senior?