You cannot evaluate what you cannot do
If nobody on your team can read infrastructure code, the interview is a vibe check with extra steps. You find out the truth in production, not in the loop.
The answer
Hiring directly: what you are really signing up for
It can absolutely work. But you are betting 6–18 months of runway on a person you have met for four hours, and you have to be right.
One person is a single point of failure
They get sick, they get poached, they burn out. The system does not care — it still has to run tonight, and now the only person who understands it is gone.
What GIIP FDE Ops does instead
You get a multi-agent AI engineering team plus a dedicated infrastructure and operations layer, under enterprise governance — with no recruiting cycle, no onboarding quarter, and no single point of failure. Hire later, when you actually know what you need.