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

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

This article focuses on the level D.

Level D

You are a driving force on the topics that you own.

• Scope of Impact: You can demonstrate impact on member and business problems. You impact the trajectory of your immediate team (eg: team or small department).
• Expertise: You have solid foundations on all the spectrum of your practice. Your solutions are high quality and can be trusted, without supervision.
• Leadership: You can be trusted to lead any medium-sized project, independently. You impulse speed and keep momentum when needed. You can frame problems and build sound, long-lasting solutions for them.

Scope of Impact

You can demonstrate impact on member and business problems. You impact the trajectory of your immediate team (eg: team or small department).

Demonstrate impact

• You are accountable for the high-level design and strategic planning of new features. You start from the problem and propose a reasoned solution. You fully own the topics you work on.
• You deliver goals on time and with a high standard of quality.

Impact the trajectory

• You identify problems to solve for your team.
• You continuously contribute to issues and your contributions consistently help your team move forward with clear next steps.
• You understand well the company’s Tech Strategy and push your team to incorporate it into their work.

Member and business problems

• You are an advocate of your team’s OKRs. You can explain how your work is connected to them and to the company’s strategy pack.
• You know how your work is connected to your team’s OKRs and why they are important.
• You are interested in and participate in team road-mapping discussions, developing and sharing clear opinions on how the team can move faster or have more impact.

Expertise

You have solid foundations on all the spectrum of your practice. Your solutions are high quality and can be trusted, without supervision.

Solid foundations

• You are able to reason about the design of Alan’s systems, you have a high level of understanding of how your code changes fit into the existing architecture and their impact.
• You are comfortable owning technical decisions for your team in a GitHub issue.
• You regularly provide relevant and actionable feedback to other engineers on the team on technical matters.

High quality

• Your technical contributions improve the quality of our codebase.
• You proactively identify ways to improve our codebase, improving the on-call and toil situation when relevant.

Trusted without supervision

• You have a significant track record of shipping well-tested, working code and when a problem arises you know how to fix it, and to help others learn from your mistake.
• You are a trusted role-buddy to onboarding Alaners and they are able to quickly ramp up on our technical stack with your help.

Leadership

You can be trusted to lead any [medium-size project, independently). You impulse speed and keep momentum when needed. You can frame problems and build sound, long-lasting solutions for them.

Trusted to lead

• You are accountable for delivering medium-size projects according to schedule.
• You take responsibility for any failures in a project that you own and take action to prevent them in the future.
• You can help other engineers with their personal growth through your technical leadership or coaching.

Medium-size project

• You have several examples of owning projects or KRs that span a cycle to a quarter for your team and own them autonomously from A-Z.
• Your projects contain some ambiguity and those around you don’t immediately know how to solve it, they are complex but self-contained and don’t necessarily have wide impacts on multiple systems.
• Your projects often rely on multiple non-engineering stakeholders and you are comfortable collaborating with them to move forward quickly.

Independently

• You are a fully independent team member, you don’t need guidance from more senior engineers to be productive within your team.
• You are able to quickly align with your team lead on the scope and the expected outcome of your projects and can own their delivery after that.

Engineering team impact

You are trusted to lead engineering team initiatives and do so regularly

• You occasionally own and regularly contribute to engineering team initiatives.
• You may start to coach Alaners up to level C1.