A new iteration of our engineering career path at Alan — Level E
This is a companion article of the more global one the engineering career path at Alan.
This article focuses on the level E.
Level E
You are a leader in your department.
- Scope of Impact: You consistently deliver a large impact on ambiguous member problems and on our business. You impact the trajectory of your extended team (eg: large team, department).
- Expertise: You are proficient on most of the technical and/or product stack, and expert on its parts related to your practice. On these, you are a go-to person, able to unblock other alaners.
- Leadership: You are a driving force in identifying large-impact problems or opportunities. You ensure short- and long-term velocity by solving complex problems with high-quality solutions. You might coordinate the work of several people from product roles as part of bringing those solutions.
Scope of impact
You consistently deliver a large impact on ambiguous member problems and on our business. You impact the trajectory of your extended team (eg: large team, department).
Large Impact
- You are comfortable owning the biggest blockers for your department and are successful in removing them
- Your peers in your department recognize your impact as being critical to the department’s success
Impact the trajectory
- You help move your department forward by developing and sharing deep opinions about department strategy
- You own the discussion of technical decisions that impact the trajectory of your department
- You consistently look outside of your immediate team and identify problems for the engineering team and department
- You often partner closely with peers from outside the engineering team
Ambiguous member and Business problems
- You are fluent in your department’s strategy, and its link to business and tech strategy, and organize your work around it.
- You turn ambiguous problems into quarter or multi-quarter efforts that may be worked on by multiple engineers.
Expertise
You are proficient on most of the technical and/or product stack, and expert on its parts related to your practice. On these, you are a go-to person, able to unblock other alaners.
Proficient on Technical & Product Stack
- You are very comfortable working on any part of our stack with a short ramp up period
- You combine business context and technical constraints and design solutions from scratch for difficult and ambiguous problems
- You have good judgment of technical risk and consistently find solutions that minimize or avoid it completely
- You align stakeholders with well reasoned proposals that clearly lay out alternative solutions and technical risks
Expert
- You may be a lead of a part of our technical stack, you are seen as a strong technical referent within Alan
- You may be a highly effective team lead who’s teams consistently deliver their expected impact
- You may help others improve their abilities to effectively lead a team either through coaching or direct feedback
Leadership
You are a driving force in identifying large-impact problems or opportunities. You ensure short- and long-term velocity by solving complex problems with high-quality solutions. You might coordinate the work of several people from product teams as part of bringing those solutions.
Driving force
- Your work consistently inspires the engineers and non-engineer peers of your department.
- You are a strong technical mentor and/or coach, you are comfortable helping level D Alaners grow to level E.
- You are an effective communicator and share proactively on the progress and plans for the projects you own.
- You may be at ease distributing key parts of a team’s scope to eng or non-eng teammates.
Identifying & Solve Complex Problems
- You identify and collaborate with multiple stakeholders to redirect focus when results are not impacting the business as expected.
- When things go wrong you are a strong leader to identify exactly why, to share with department stakeholders, and to ensure we make appropriate changes to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
- You own quarter long projects for a team of multiple engineers and are able to break down the projects into individual objectives that can be distributed.
Ensure velocity with high-quality solutions
- You know how to balance a scrappy solution that will help us move fast and the risks of accumulating tech debt and articulate it clearly within your department.
- You act as an owner of your department’s technical stack and show responsibility for its design decisions.
- You speak out regarding code maintainability and testability, you identify and execute on significant departments for improvement, building a pit of success for all engineers in the team.
Engineering team impact
You identify and own improvements for the whole engineering team
- You own improvements or experimentations that are well framed and impact the entire engineering team.
- You focus on editing the engineering team, by ensuring the understanding and durability of your changes.
- You are effective at attracting senior (D+) engineers to join Alan and mentoring them when they arrive.