[oldprogrammer2]

This is very much the perspective I have taken over the years. When I'm hiring a senior developer, I'm looking for someone who will step in and own the project they're given. If I had to pick a single expression, especially one recognizable to this crowd, I would say it is someone who can execute. I also tend to view senior developers almost as internal consultants (good ones) because they should be willing and able to step away from they keyboard and talk to a stakeholder to discern what the business really needs without needing someone else to act as an intermediary.

Where I do disagree just a little bit with mrmekon, is that I tend to look for people who have experience with the necessary stack. I would be hesitant to hire a senior developer for a C#/MVC position if they have (broadly) never used C# or never done web development, for example. Modern stacks have a lot of moving parts, and I would prefer senior developers to understand how to troubleshoot, tune, upgrade, test, and deploy on the needed stack. These are things that a very strong developer could remediate within a few projects, though, which is why I only slightly disagree with mrmekon.

[rufius]

With regard to your last comment about hiring senior devs with experience in the stack: I would say it depends on what you're hiring for and your long term vision for your team I think.

In my team's case, I was hired to do ML/BigData but had no prior experience. My boss's philosophy is that he wants smart engineers with a desire to learn more than he wants area experts. He's been burned more than once with area experts who were unable to pivot well with the shifting priorities of the team.

That said - if you're hiring someone to come be your ML expert then that requires an expert. Tech stacks are less that way in my opinion and they're rarely static. Even the debugging and troubleshooting tends to be similar if you know the problem space.