From Melissa DeTora:

I was a Level 2 judge before starting at Wizards in January 2015. I had actually been judging for the majority of the time I’d been playing professionally, having certified in 2004. I became an L2 in 2012 as a way to improve my rules and policy knowledge, which helped me improve as a player as well.

As a Magic developer, having 11 years of judging experience has helped me in many ways. The most obvious way is that when we are designing cards, I can easily identify what won’t work with the current rules and let the rules manager know of any potential problems, as well as figuring out how new cards should be worded so that they work. Another way that judging has helped me is that I can I can identify crazy corner-case scenarios that come up during FFL play. If we feel that these scenarios are not appropriate for tournament play, we’d either cut them from the set or even weaken the cards so that it won’t show up in Standard. There are lots of things that come up in playtesting where knowing the Comprehensive rules and the Magic Tournament Rules comes in handy. Things like tournament shortcuts and priority passing are the first things that come to mind. For example, sometimes I will identify scenarios where a card would play in an unfair way due to the tournament shortcut rules, and we may change that card to make it play in a more fun way.