A new iteration of our engineering career path at Alan — Level C1

This is a companion article of the more global one the engineering career path at Alan.

This article focuses on the level C1.

Level C1

Same as C0: Your mandate is to grow while actively contributing.

• Scope of Impact: You can demonstrate a clear impact on problems that you own within your immediate team.
• Expertise: You are autonomous on core skills, building fluency and mastery on the full-spectrum.
• Leadership: You are autonomous to drive your projects, with support for scoping and framing or when the project becomes too ambiguous.

Scope of impact

You can demonstrate a clear impact on problems that you own within your immediate team

Demonstrate a clear impact on problems that you own

• You act as a technical referent for the framing of tasks with some ambiguity and ship them.
• You find creative solutions to implement the problems you own elegantly and effectively, with some guidance from more senior engineers.
• You work side by side with a more senior engineer on a large ambiguous project.
• You speed-up your team by prioritizing the right things and by not overcomplicating your work.
• You proactively ask for clarification if you don’t understand how the project you are working on is impacting your team’s OKRs.

Your immediate team

• You are trusted to give quality PR reviews on small to medium level changes.
• You are aware of the goals, risks and constraints, and take them into account in your day to day work.
• You help the team by onboarding new engineers.
• You contribute to the core processes of the team, including recommending and implementing process improvements.

Expertise

You are autonomous on core skills, building fluency and mastery on the full-spectrum.

Autonomous on core skills

• You are comfortable working on any part of the stack, after a short ramp up
• You troubleshoot your own work and you rarely need help from more senior engineers.
• You anticipate upcoming challenges and blockers, and take the relevant actions (with help from your peers if necessary) to move the work forward.

Building fluency and mastery

• You make targeted changes to the code to leave it in a better state that you found it.
• You successfully apply existing architectural patterns on the projects that you contribute to.
• You are a force of proposition on selected initiatives by proposing new ideas on Github discussions.

Leadership

You are autonomous to drive your projects, with support for scoping and framing or when the project becomes too ambiguous.

Autonomous to drive your projects

• You operate as an engineering referent on the framing and making of well defined problems with some ambiguity.
• You consistently keep your team informed of progress and are able to flag changes in scope on a specific project.

With support for scoping and framing

• You frame problems effectively with limited support from more senior engineers.
• You make sure that all your assumptions have been verified before your work starts.
• You seek feedback about new architectural decisions you are making and the effectiveness of your work.

Engineering team impact

You are an active contributor to helping the engineering team run with a small scope.

• You contribute to at least one engineering team initiative on a regular basis (recruiting, incident management, onboarding, mentoring, etc.)