Career Leveling Guide
Principal+ Engineer
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | You identify and are given the hardest organization-level problems to solve. You may be responsible for a significant resources/budget, and if so, use them judiciously. You define long-term technical roadmaps and organization objectives for up to a year or more, and other documentation. |
| Risk Management | Manage/identify organizational wide risk. Architect to reduce risk inline with cross company initiatives. |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Able to contribute insights outside of core domains of expertise. You effectively influence the decisions made by senior leaders and x-functional teams. Trail Blazing. Defines the techniques which later become industry standards. Develops and protects Intellectual Property for the business. |
| Big Picture | Play a large role in defining the company's bigger picture. Align engineering capability and product strategy on up to 3-5 year time frame. |
| Influence and Impact | Organization/Company (150+). Multiple Departmental functions (e.g. Marketing + Core Product) |
| Leadership / Ownership | You are an owner in the business, defining the culture within engineering and routinely spanning multiple functions (e.g. Legal, Marketing, Product) to ensure our roadmap is strategic on all dimensions. |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | Drive company initiatives from inception to release without regular technical oversight. You build technical leaders of the organization, structuring efforts to help others develop their potential by giving them appropriate ownership and responsibility. You know when to step in and when not to. You are mindful of the power your perspective has on discussions. You have significant expertise in your field. You are recognized internally as a thought leader. |
| Communication | You communicate a strategic direction. Your role often requires you to collaborate and negotiate with stakeholders, executive leadership, vendors, and company partners. Lead company wide technical dialog. You foster a collaborative and inclusive culture across the organization and company, where ideas and discussions are respected at all levels. If you have an external facing role, you are trusted to represent the company on matters of great significance. |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | Your work has significant impact on one or more organizations. You may have a global impact on technologies, products, customers, or partners. You contribute by making major influencing innovations and/or setting a vision for a critical technology. You influence broadly within the company, driving policies, best practices and new approaches for excellence in your field. Mentors across company and industry. Crafts engineering culture for both the organization as well as the company. |
| Delivery | Strong evidence of consistent operational improvement across multiple dimensions of our technology capability. Specifically (but not limited to) reducing cost, improving stability, horizontal scaling, reducing time to market. |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | Extreme tolerance for ambiguity |
| balanced judgement. |
Principal Engineer
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | Proactively and Consistently take ownership over significantly complex problems that span multiple teams and at times the entire organization. Own technical roadmapping for multiple quarters to a year where the long-term business and/or technology strategy may not clear. Clear ability to translate direction and end result into actionable steps based on available resources. A Principal Engineer can articulate how to take a group from here to there in pragmatic stages whilst delivering business results. |
| Risk Management | Manage/identify organizational wide risk. Architect to reduce risk inline with cross company initiatives. |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Carrying domain expertise outside of their organization and establishing best practices across the company. Trusted advisor to senior leadership. Demonstrates domain knowledge about other areas of the organization. |
| Big Picture | Lead product strategy discussions with senior management representing your teams and organization. Awareness of our business performance and strong partnership with key stakeholders to drive business outcomes. |
| Influence and Impact | Organization (50+). Department Function e.g. Cardio |
| Leadership / Ownership | You are an owner in the business, defining the culture within engineering and routinely spanning multiple functions (e.g. Legal, Marketing, Product) to ensure our roadmap is strategic on all dimensions. |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | You use your significant expertise and high judgment to incorporate diverse inputs from customers and stakeholders into a cohesive technical vision, strategy, and/or solution. Reduce complexity through good architectural practices impacting the entire organization. Drive organization initiatives from inception to release without regular technical oversight. |
| Communication | You are a critical bridge between senior leadership and your organization, making sure expectations are aligned. Engaged in company wide technical dialog. Coordinate problem solving across many internal and external teams, focused on long-term goals and critically important priorities. Sharing knowledge outside the team in various formats is expected, ability to translate engineering concepts to business partners. Should be leading conversations with relevant business and product partners. |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | Significant track record of mentorship and leveling up teams, technical leadership across organization boundaries, and collaboration. Aid in recruiting of excellent talent and leaders to their organization. Instrumental in improving cross-team and organizational efficiency, partnering across organizational lines. Your work impacts the way an organization operates (strategic decisions, goals, prioritization, team implementation). You consistently raise the bar. Pro-actively identifying new dimensions and initiatives that can enrich our community. You use your influence to gain buy in and support, soliciting input across the organization and blazing the trail for others to follow. |
| Delivery | Strong evidence of consistent operational improvement across multiple dimensions of our technology capability. Specifically (but not limited to) reducing cost, improving stability, horizontal scaling, reducing time to market. |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | Extreme tolerance for ambiguity |
| balanced judgement. Seen as a leader in the organization and responsible to tamp down the entropy. |
Sr Staff Engineer
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | Proactively and Consistently take ownership over ambiguous, complex, and large initiatives that require delegation, collaboration, investigation. Own technical roadmapping for your domain and be able to operate where the short-term business and/or technology strategy is not clear. Proficient in scoping problems and organizing projects across teams. Influences decisions around design solutions that must be able to provide a platform/reusable solution for various problems, rather than just problem at hand. Thinks long term and big picture initiatives. Exhibits high judgement to navigate the grey area between ideal solution and possible solution based on available resources. |
| Risk Management | Manages priorities, tradeoffs, forecast/manage risk, identify and direct solutions in cross-team deliverables. Orchestrate team deliverables and priorities to minimize risk across multiple projects and teams. |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Is a leader within their organization in domain of expertise and proactively explores new technologies (hands on) to understand how they may be relevant to us. Evaluate options and provide recommendations on scope and scale of effort required to implement final requirements. Proactively identifies opportunities for strategic investment and can form actionable proposals that articulate risk/reward benefits at a team or cross-team level. |
| Big Picture | Work in collaboration with Sr management/product to turn product strategy into action. Direct product execution. Understanding of engineering in how they contribute to product metrics, execution and customer experience. Awareness of our business performance and emergent partnership with key stakeholders to drive business outcomes. |
| Influence and Impact | Team/Partner Teams (30-50). Consistently impacting multiple teams in a Department function or Domain. You are a strong collaborator able to partner with core-capabilities (e.g. platform) teams and drive the requirements for shared capabilities (e.g. API Gateway). |
| Leadership / Ownership | Your presence on the team up-levels those around you. Your inclusion on the team automatically reduces risk; either delivery or operational support. |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | You use your expertise and judgment to analyze and define the problem or opportunity, identify risks and constraints, and influence an actionable strategy. Provide direction in large cross-functional initiatives. Highly autonomous requiring no oversight. |
| Communication | Team levels up and learns new skills as a result of your input. Track record of written and oral communication excellence. Able to facilitate a contentious discussion and drive correct decision making even if unpopular. You communicate regularly with senior management and stakeholders who provide feedback and direction. You lead by example by practicing open and respectful dialogue. You influence others to improve processes and drive projects forward. You coordinate across different groups and create formal networks of people to get things done. You are mastering negotiating priorities and trade-offs. |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | Track record of mentorship, technical leadership, and collaboration. Aid in recruiting of excellent talent. Instrumental in improving team efficiency. Contribute to the strategic organization design of the department. Continued and constant mentorship of fellow team members. Sponsorship of more junior engineers. You're setting teams and engineers up for success. You set the standard for how they operate. You influence team policies. Modeling the way - you consistently embody the culture laid out by the organization and are a culture carrier. As a Sr Staff you begin to raise the bar and break new ground in how we operate and evolve our team culture and development practices. |
| Delivery | You have a strategic mindset demonstrated through delivery of complex initiatives that enable/unlock other teams and/or competitive advantage in the marketplace. |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | High tolerance for ambiguous situations over an extended period. Able to partner with leadership and influence the team to help the group navigate through ambiguous situations |
Staff Engineer
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | Proactively and Consistently take ownership over ambiguous, complex, and large initiatives that require delegation, collaboration, investigation. Own technical roadmapping for your domain and are able to operate where the short-term business and/or technology strategy is not clear. You avoid reinventing the wheel and leverage org-wide capabilities as appropriate. Able to scope problems and organize projects across teams. Design solutions must be able to provide a platform/reusable solution for various problems, rather than just problem at hand. |
| Risk Management | Manage priorities, tradeoffs, forecast/manage risk, identify and implement solutions in cross-team deliverables. Sequence deliverables/manage priorities to minimize risk across multiple projects and teams. Proactively Identifying Operational Risk (software versions, security, experience/feature risk) and determine/propose remediation. |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Is a leader within their organization in domain of expertise. Understands scope and scale of effort required to implement final requirements. Acute awareness of industry standards and high-judgement exhibited on pros and cons of bleeding edge techniques. |
| Big Picture | Work in collaboration with management/product to turn product strategy into action. You are an enabler for product execution. Clear articulation of how engineering contributes to product metrics, execution and customer experience. |
| Influence and Impact | Team/Partner Teams (15-30). Multiple teams in a Departmental function or Domain. You are a strong collaborator able to partner with core-capabilities (e.g. platform) teams to leverage shared capabilities and drive alignment. |
| Leadership / Ownership | Your presence on the team up-levels those around you. Your inclusion on the team automatically reduces risk; either delivery or operational support. |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | You use your expertise and judgment to analyze and define the problem or opportunity, identify risks and constraints, and propose an actionable strategy. Provide direction in large cross-functional initiatives. Deliver work with infrequent oversight. |
| Communication | Team levels up and learns new skills as a result of your input. Track record of written and oral communication excellence. Excellent Presentation skills and ability to Facilitate a large-room discussion. You communicate regularly with senior management and stakeholders who provide feedback and direction. You participate in and encourage an open and respectful dialogue. You interact with others to improve processes and drive projects forward. You coordinate across different groups and create formal networks of people to get things done. You are learning how to negotiate priorities and trade-offs |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | Track record of mentorship, technical leadership, and collaboration. Aid in recruiting of excellent talent. Instrumental in improving team efficiency. Continued and constant mentorship of fellow team members. You're setting teams and engineers up for success. You set the standard for how they operate. You influence team policies. Modeling the way - you consistently embody the culture laid out by the organization and are a culture carrier |
| Delivery | Strategic Capabilities |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | High tolerance for ambiguous situations over an extended period |
Readiness check
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | Pro-actively step forward to take ownership over ambiguous, complex, and large initiatives. Scope problems and break down tasks for yourself and other engineers in a team. Proactive in identifying dependencies across teams. Exhibit versatility in your ability and willingness to take on new challenges across the full-stack. |
| Risk Management | Manage priorities, tradeoffs, forecast/manage risk, identify, implement, and oversee solutions in team deliverables. Sequence deliverables and manage priorities to minimize risk. Proactively Identifying Operational Risk (software versions, security, experience/feature risk) |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Expert in domain of expertise. Clear demonstration of architectural and systems thinking. Strong awareness of industry standards including forward looking and emergent standards. Able to bring those lessons into the team in a pragmatic way. Trusted advisor and teacher for more junior team members. |
| Big Picture | Strong understanding of and involvement in product strategy, can recommend and drive solutions for critical issues. Strong understanding of how product initiatives affect product metrics and objectives. |
| Influence and Impact | Team (5-15). Emergent skills across multiple teams |
(AND / OR) You are the tech lead for the team |
|
| Leadership / Ownership | You routinely lead the way, bringing new optimizations and process improvements to bear within your team. |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | Self directed, lead team in deliverables, drive increases in team velocity. On-call ownership of service or functional area, ability to own improvement of a running service. Identify and proactively drive areas of improvement/risk. Utilize expertise to manage project priorities’ deadlines. |
| Communication | Enable team as a result of your input which is given without being explicitly solicited. Over communication is expected: Strong track record of being able to drive conversation, collaborate on solutions, and build consensus. Sharing knowledge across teams in various formats is expected. Proficient in working with other teams to accomplish your goals. Strong collaboration with Staff+ SWE to drive consistency |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | Values the success of the team over their individual progress, and is consistently taking leadership over delivering outcomes. Has mentored several junior engineers, delegating previous responsibilities to others. Drive consensus and direction. You drive changes to policies and establish new procedures related to hiring, interviewing, onboarding etc. Actively participate in the recruiting process. Active participant in our company culture. Pro-active in establishing team-cohesion and shared team identity. |
| Delivery | Entire Features leveraging strategic capabilities |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | Able to maintain momentum and navigate through MEDIUM term ambiguity |
Sr Software Engineer
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | Display ownership over complex, and large initiatives that include a medium degree of ambiguity. Scope problems and break down tasks for yourself and other engineers on the team. |
| Risk Management | Manage priorities, tradeoffs, forecast/manage risk, identify and implement solutions in team deliverables. Sequence deliverables/manage priorities to minimize risk. |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Expert in domain of expertise. Clear demonstration of architectural and systems thinking. Beginning to have awareness of industry standards. Trusted advisor and teacher for more junior team members. |
| Big Picture | Clear understanding of product strategy, can recommend solutions to critical issues. Understanding of how product initiatives affect product metrics and objectives. |
| Influence and Impact | Team (3-8). Begin to see skills go Broad OR Deep. Ready to step up to play the role of Tech lead for the team |
| Leadership / Ownership | Demonstrate ownership of specific un-assigned tasks, deliverables and issues, setting the tone for your peers and team members. Working alongside other Sr SWEs on the team. Beginning to lead the way. |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | Self directed, lead team in deliverables, drive increases in team velocity. On call ownership of service or functional area, ability to own improvement of a running service. Own areas of improvement/risk. |
| Communication | Enable team as a result of your input. Over communication is expected: Track record of being able to collaborate on solutions, and build consensus. Sharing knowledge within team in various formats is expected. Proficient in working with other teams to accomplish your goals. |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | Values the success of the team over their individual progress, and is often taking leadership over delivering outcomes. Has mentored at least one junior engineer, delegating previous responsibilities to others. Drive consensus and direction. You recommend changes to policies and establish new procedures related to hiring, interviewing, onboarding etc. Active participant in our company culture. |
| Delivery | Entire Features |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | Able to maintain momentum and navigate through short term ambiguity |
Software Engineer III
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | Actionable tasks that require both collaboration and disambiguation to complete. Display ownership over medium to large projects and the ability to break out work and drive to completion. |
| Risk Management | Forecast/manage risk, identify and implement solutions in own deliverables. Escalation before issues become execution risk. |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Advanced in domain. Familiar in other areas of expertise outside of your team. |
| Big Picture | Clear understanding of strategy, can recommend solutions to critical issues. |
| Influence and Impact | Peers (2-5) |
| Leadership / Ownership | Demonstrate ownership of specific assigned tasks, deliverables and issues, encouraging your peers to resolve as well as making individual contributions. |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | Self directed, owns completion of assigned projects, significant individual contributor to team velocity. On call duties required, with strong incident management skills. Flag areas of improvement/risk (Kaizen) |
| Communication | Go to person for several aspects of the system. Shares their knowledge in various formats within the team as well as other stakeholder teams |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | You are engaged in team meetings arch/tech discussion, and code reviews. You are one of the key representatives for your team. Improve team productivity. Contributes to interviewing process. Active participant in our company culture |
| Delivery | Multiple related Epics |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | Evidence of balanced judgement and tolerance for ambiguity emerging |
Software Engineer II
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | Actionable tasks that require collaboration to complete. Display ownership over small to medium sized projects. |
| Risk Management | Escalate with manager/lead before being blocked. Escalate with manager/lead if blocked. All PRs are tested (ad-hoc and/or automated), able to consistently deploy reliable code without oversight |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Competent in domain, familiar with other areas of domain expertise within the team. |
| Big Picture | Awareness and contribution in strategy. Understand product requirements and help product owners refine delegated work. |
| Influence and Impact | Self + Inform manager / mentor of your status. |
| Leadership / Ownership | Demonstrate strong ownership of your own individual tasks and medium sized projects |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | You use your knowledge to propose workable solutions, with some guidance from your manager or more senior peers. On call duties required, escalating as needed |
| Communication | Inform your team of status. Shares knowledge with their team with existing processes and documentation. |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | Proficient with team process. Positive influence on team. Can be feature lead with supervision. Involved within interview process for your team. Active participant in our company culture |
| Delivery | User Stories & Epics |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | Developing |
Software Engineer I
| Category | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Scope and Complexity | Actionable, well defined tasks that require little collaboration to complete. Research before asking. |
| Risk Management | Following department best practices. Escalate with manager/lead if blocked. All PRs are tested (ad-hoc and/or automated), able to consistently deploy reliable code without oversight |
| Domain Expertise (Knowledge) | Learning domain and industry best practices. |
| Big Picture | Understands how their work contributes to the team. |
| Influence and Impact | Self and possibly your decision making authority. Inform manager / mentor of your status. |
| Leadership / Ownership | Demonstrate strong ownership of your own individual tasks |
| Responsibility/Direction Required/Ownership | Daily/weekly guidance from peers / manager. |
| Communication | Inform manager / mentor of your status. |
| Team Contribution - People & Culture | Learns/follows team process. Active participant in our company culture |
| Delivery | User Stories |
| Ambiguity & Judgement | Developing |