sveska | Career track senior

Career track senior

[last update: 08 Feb 2024]

Responsibilities:

Expert in our processes, while also helping to define and improve them.
Writes meaningful code reviews.
Makes well-reasoned design decisions, identifying potential issues, trade-offs, risks, and appropriate levels of abstraction.
Proficient in all relevant technical skills, and able to move quickly due to a deep understanding of large portions of the codebase (cross teams).
Maintains awareness of industry trends and tools.
Debugs expertly within their primary focus area.
Writes tech specs and identifies risks before starting major projects.
Sets technical standards for the team.
Goes out of their way to reduce complexity within the team’s systems.
Become a Chief of at least one of the team’s primary systems.
As a Chief of a system, defines and drives the roadmap / vision for that system.
Produces high-quality BetterNexts from production incidents (or interesting wins).
Takes Security and Cost (cloud resources & time investment) into considerations when designing a technical solution.

Examples:

During a code-review, able to supplement comments with links to relevant resources or other examples, and thus instructing the code committer.
Offers a quarterly roadmap of the system of which they are a Chief.
Can reason about “buy vs. build” when promoting technical initiatives (i.e. should we build a solution ourselves or buy an existing one).

Anti-Patterns:

Doesn’t delegate. Always says “yes” and suffers from burn-out or continuous loss of focus.
Lets details slip through the cracks.
Over-emphasises scaling or high availability far beyond the requirements (project/business needs).
Prefers local solutions to more global problems, especially if a problem is an obvious issue to multiple teams.

Responsibilities:

Able to take ownership to lead and deliver large projects (>4w of work) that spans multiple systems, with support from peers.
When acting as the Project Lead on a project, communicates progress to stakeholders and ensures alignment.
Persistent in the face of roadblocks; dispatches them efficiently, pulling in others as necessary.
Scopes and stages work into well-defined milestones to avoid a monolithic deliverable.
Accountable end-to-end, through planning, development, deploy, monitoring and maintenance.
Sets realistic deadlines, estimating methodically based on iterative learning.
Able to question and push back on tasks/requirements.
Able to reduce complexity and prioritize in alignment with company goals.
Handles well open-ended problems and ambiguity.
Suggests steps to mitigate impact of delays in projects.
Requires minimal direction / oversight.
Ensures projects don’t lose momentum.
Delivers design reviews for complex projects.
Seeks empirical validation through PoCs, tests and research.

Examples:

Able to separate requirements/pains from the solution, and, if needed, agree on the former before the latter. Avoids coming up with a solution that many people will think solves the wrong requirement (or are confused due to not knowing what the requirements are).
Leads a Design Review of a fairly large project (more than 6 weeks of engineering time).
Mitigates risks of a complex DR which requires a new technology or uses a new capability, by doing proper research as part of the DR process: e.g. running a small-scale PoC to validate a risk/concern that might affect the DR.
Gets buy-in from other lead developers before presenting a DR to a wider audience.

Anti-Patterns:

Rushes to work on the solution before gathering and understanding business/analytical/technical needs.
Doesn’t clearly state the risks in the project and how they will be mitigated.
Unable to lead other teammates in the project. Has problems with e.g. delegation, tasks assignment, solving roadblocks, communications around progress, etc.
Doesn’t push back (and provides alternatives and justifications) on requirements that might add risk, add a lot of time to the project or make it extremely hard to maintain.

Responsibilities:

Understands well the pains of other teams around them (first circle / immediate internal customers)
Proactively seeks to talk with internal customers to understand their pains and how the team can serve them better
Can clearly document and share their insights and suggestions from talking with other teams, so the team can learn from it and initiate ideas around it - some will be solved within the team, some will be given as feedback to other teams.
Takes an interest in business performance: understand our ARR, how margins affect the business (covered vs. uncovered), knows the big logos we sold to, etc.
Understands the roles of all the departments , with focus on the sales pipeline, with good understanding their responsibilities, where they influence as part of the sales cycle, etc.
Takes costs, security and other business impacting aspects into consideration, e.g. when suggesting new initiatives, as part of DRs, etc.

Examples:

Can draw on a whiteboard the systems involved in precision mechanisms (e.g. VT, AxTx, Attributes, Velocity, Models, Decision Manager, etc.)
Can explain (high level) the full cycle of selling to a customer: marketing (generating a lead), pre-sale, sale, onboarding (CS/Ops) and serving the customer for the long run.
Shares a document with the team, and other relevant teams, around information they got from their internal customers. With well-crafted summary of the biggest pains (with priorities), relevant suggestions (with high level cost/estimation and gain from that), and basic priorities as they see fit (with business justification).

Anti-Patterns:

Doesn’t spend enough time to document proper pains & suggestions, keeping it all in their heads and relying only on their memory.
Spends too much of their time focusing on the team and the team’s needs, instead of trying to increase their impact circle with other teams around them.