Hack the ladder: Scope, Skills & Responsibilities for modern software engineering

tl;dr: HR decisions ARE Type 1 decisions. You better put some thought to it early and avoid too much tinkering. I am presenting my take on the “standardized” Silicon Valley tech sector levels and related expectations for individual contributor engineers after 10+ years working in Silicon Valley and sitting through numerous hiring and promotion committee meetings at Uber and Facebook. Includes typical distributions, sample responsibilities and management goals for the busy CTO looking to set up a similar system in a growing startup and time management suggestions to help ambitious engineers looking to grow into the next level.

Uber vs Google vs Facebook levels from levels.fyi

Intro

“With great scale comes great responsibility.”

So you are an aspiring CTO with a growing engineering team and you need to start thinking about how to introduce some structure into your organization? After all, a team of 20–30 people can’t fit in the large conference room anymore and the last time you talked to that junior mobile developer was when he was first hired 6 months ago. How do you approach leveling and expectations from your engineering team in a way that maximizes performance, employee satisfaction and retention?

Making good HR related decisions very early in the lifetime of the company is critical for long term success as major overhauls of the system are extremely painful and even minor tweaks are frequently met with suspicion and distrust. For the Jeff Bezos fans out there: HR decisions ARE Type 1 decisions. If you want to avoid setting up a slow burning fuse bomb at the foundation of your organization read on.

On one side there are companies like Microsoft with structures that split levels to at least 2 or even 3 sublevels so that they can basically offer promotions every year and give employees a constant sense of progression, usually though without substantial compensation/expectation changes across levels especially among the lower ones.

On the other extreme, there are companies like Netflix that only officially recognize a single level for all engineers and put increased focus on impact, skillset and responsibility. Even there though differentiated compensation per skillset (ML engineers are in very high demand lately) and/or years of experience create some level of structure anyway. Netflix’s approach definitely stems from a unique culture and approach to HR, but in the end they also tend to normalize around similar frameworks (Business Impact, Technical Depth, Cross-functional/Collaboration, People skills). I will take a deeper look into these frameworks in a subsequent post when I talk about Engineering Archetypes.

The majority of tech companies implement small variations of the same “standardized” 7 level career ladder (Level 3 to Level 10 or short L3-L10) that was pioneered by Google, with similar definitions/expectations and compensation packages. Slight variations exist based on company culture or history e.g. Apple uses a shorter ladder or Uber inexplicably refers to the L6 level as L5b to maximize confusion and Facebook characteristically refers to its levels as E3-E10 to emphasize its engineering culture (and probably to differentiate from Google since they are locked in an ever escalating tit-for-tat to attract the best engineers). Newer companies (e.g. Stripe, Robinhood) tend to be a bit thinner at the top (levels L7+) since the scale of the company and the engineering organization usually doesn’t support the scope that these levels require. This is most evident during acquisitions, when the CTO of the smaller company can frequently be plugged into an L7 or L8 role in a bigger company.

The standardized leveling approach has several benefits for the tech ecosystem as a whole:

• For companies: Ability to gauge talent market competitiveness through salary-bands (e.g. Pay for skill). Verify general level of employee skill set when hiring across the industry. Utilize HR best practices from tech industry leaders. (Notoriously hard to get right with custom solutions, but to be fair unique company cultures can also be a competitive advantage. Check out this seminal book from Tony Hsieh on this topic or the books by the Basecamp team). Maintain ability to differentiate hiring through benefits or mission instead of operational characteristics.
• For employees: A well-defined career path reducing bias for promotions/perf reviews and better “collective” bargaining power based on salary-bands (which tend to be relatively open in the end whether you like it or not). Ability to have a transferable skill-set/profile and not get “employer-locked”. Better clarity on what type of skills or type of work is expected to grow.

With this setup in mind here is my take on the standardized career ladder. While I have direct experience from working with people in levels from L3-L8 I have never worked directly with L9+ people beyond observing the rare tech talk or all-hands, so their inclusion is definitely symbolic to round out the ladder. However since the majority of engineers and companies mostly utilize these levels I think my observations are still highly relevant!

This framework could be used directly as your official career ladder out of the box though my intention is to focus more on scope, skills and responsibilities of individual contributor engineers in the market as you compete on a global scale for talent. I plan to cover other aspects of the final HR decision making like open/closed levels or compensation in future write-ups.

Before we get started a quick note/helper on my writing style. I am a big fan of list based frameworks and especially taxonomies as a methodology to make sense of a complex world. Based on my training the sole purpose of an expert is to draw powerful distinctions to help make decision analysis better and these types of frameworks put you on the right path to do just that. So you can expect some of these presented in each of my write-ups, along with the tl;dr sections.

Taxonomies

Levels of Assistance

• Guide: When guiding people one provides clear and direct pointers to solutions that others can follow.
• Mentor: When mentoring people one provides suggestions and also space to others to explore their own paths.
• Grow: When helping people grow one makes sure to set the general direction, but then gets the hell out of the way.

Company Organization

• Team: The primary unit of organizational composition. Usually consists of 5–15 people.
• Org: Larger organizational units consisting of multiple teams. Usually come with a unique revenue/cost center on the balance sheet and as such they have an executive leader (L8+) making decisions. Usually consists of 40–100 people.
• Company: The ultimate decision center of the business oversees the operations of all organizational units. From 1 to 1.000.000s of people.

Engineering Level Overview

• Scope: The level of complexity that people at this level operate in. You can also think of it as the largest unit of work that the engineer is expected to have direct ownership of.
• Time Management: A rough breakdown of the top 2–3 areas that people are expected to spend their working time on (Mostly focused on software engineering). Assumes a managerial/team overhead of 5% (e.g. sync meetings and the occasional all-hands)
• Distribution: A “typical” distribution of engineers at this level out of the entire org/company. While some companies or teams will want to focus more on some levels depending on their needs or stage I have found out that in the long term or with sufficient scale orgs tend to approach these numbers especially in big tech.
• Sample Responsibilities: A non-exhaustive list of responsibilities that people at this level are expected to perform. It’s mostly focused on software engineering, but can be adjusted/extended for other types as well.
• Management Goals: A rough breakdown of what managing people operating at this level should be trying to achieve.
• Recruiting: A list of the most common places that people at this level are recruited from.

Levels

L3 (Raw Potential)

tl;dr: A team member with raw potential to evolve into an invaluable contributor. Typically a person’s first full-time engineering job out of college or after transferring from different career paths into engineering. Needs guidance, mentoring and growth to realize their potential.

Scope: Task

Time management: 80% Coding, 15% Learning

Distribution: 10–20% of engineering (company or org level)

Sample Responsibilities

• Writes, tests, and documents code within the team and platform area.
• Debugs and fixes issues in development, test, and production.
• Participates in design for systems, features and fixes.
• Participates in on-call rotations as first responder for team and platform.
• Understands team codebase, product area and systems. Makes suggestions to fix & improve things.
• Effectively collaborates with other team members to estimate task complexity/duration and completes most of tasks on schedule.
• Gives constructive feedback and works to improve based on feedback received.
• Steadily progresses towards the next level within a reasonable timeline (1–2 years).

Management Goals

• Guide the engineer to learn good production engineering best practices.
• Guide them to become a productive collaborator as fast as possible.
• Guide them through initial tasks/projects, but also teach them how to figure things out for themselves and how to get unblocked.
• Mentor them into handling increasingly complex tasks and taking more responsibility in projects.
• Grow them into leading entire projects with minimal guidance.

Recruiting

• Successful undergraduate intern returning after graduation.
• New university graduate. (Bachelor’s, Master’s degree in related fields)
• Internal transfer from non-eng role.
• Former (product/designer) usually freelancer with 2+ years of experience.
• 1–3 years as an engineer in the engineering department of a non-tech company.
• 1–2 years as an engineer in a similar tech company. (Though with experience like that you would probably expect this engineer to be ready for L4)

L4 (Proven Potential)

tl;dr: Engineers at this level have typically demonstrated a basic ability to work mostly independently at small scale within a professional team and have a good understanding of core underlying principles/fundamentals. Most importantly engineers at this level are first expected to demonstrate a level of ownership and are accountable for tracking/contributing to the team’s OKRs.

Scope: Feature

Time management : 75% Coding, 10% Collaboration, 10% Learning

Distribution: 20–30% of engineering (company or org level)

Sample Responsibilities

Able to perform all the responsibilities of an L3 +

• Designs, develops, ships, and maintains medium to large features (each with many tasks) within the team and platform area with sustained self-driven productivity.
• Owns one or more features end to end that affect team metrics with minimal guidance.
• Demonstrates strong engineering skills in code development, testing, maintenance, tooling, documentation etc.
• Has a strong understanding of team codebase, product area and systems. Identifies and drives changes as needed.
• Works well with other teams or across disciplines (Product, Design, Ops, etc).
• Onboards new engineers, guides and mentors L3 engineers.
• Participates in org building activities (Interviewing, Teaching, etc)
• Demonstrates self-improving attitude by learning best practices and investing in improving technical skills. Gives constructive feedback and works to improve based on feedback received.
• Steadily progresses towards the next level within a reasonable timeline (~2–3 years).

Management Goals

• Guide the engineer through the team roadmap, but also teach them how to interpret the overall goals of the team and org.
• Mentor them into driving increasingly complex features and taking more responsibility in projects.
• Grow them into active contributors to the team roadmap.

Recruiting

• Internal promotion from L3
• Successful postgraduate intern (Phd) returning after graduation.
• New university graduate. (Phd in related fields)
• 1–4 years as an engineer in a similar tech company.
• 5+ years as an engineer in the engineering department of a non-tech company.

L5 (Independent Contributor)

tl;dr: The first terminal level! Engineers at this level have demonstrated the ability to own the execution of multi-quarter projects e2e, through active engagement with stakeholders from the ideation phase, to the execution and long-term planning. They are expected to own and be accountable for contributing directly to the team’s OKRs. It’s usually not enough to just execute, but need to be directly involved in decision making.

Scope: Project

Time management: 70% Coding, 10% Design, 10% Learning/Teaching, 5% Cross-team Collaboration/Project Management,

Distribution: 25–35% of engineering (company or org level)

Sample Responsibilities

Able to perform all the responsibilities of an L4 +

• Designs, develops, ships, and maintains large projects (each with many features) within the team and platform area with sustained self-driven high productivity. Demonstrated track record of successfully completing large projects.
• Go-to person for some technical area (component, feature or system) with some level of reputation beyond the immediate team.
• Demonstrates, teaches & reinforces strong engineering skills/practices in code development, testing, maintenance, tooling, documentation etc.
• Team Influencer: Proactively finds problems, makes suggestions and drives to resolutions often without guidance both in terms of systems as well as process.
• Leads team members in estimating project complexity/duration and drives the team roadmap for the owned projects. May lead some projects/small teams of people directly including running team operations (team meetings, writing project status reports, etc).
• Participates effectively in cross-functional projects with other teams and across disciplines (Product, Design, Ops, etc) and is able to build relationships as needed across teams to increase effectiveness.
• Maintains a good team culture and working environment; Gives constructive feedback and works to improve based on feedback received. Helps the team manager to provide fair and accurate feedback as to the performance of other members on the team and participates in helping to make the team better.
• Prioritizes and values unowned or undesirable work that enables the team to operate better.
• Participates in org building activities (Recruiting, Teaching, External etc) & actively mentors within the team.
• Demonstrates self-improving attitude by learning new technologies and investing in improving technical and soft skills.

Management Goals

• Guide the engineer through tricky aspects of large-projects (e.g. cross-team collaboration), but also teach them how to interpret the overall goals of the org and make correct tradeoffs.
• Mentor them into delivering increasingly complex projects and taking a more visible role representing the team.
• Grow them into active contributors to the org decision making process.

Recruiting

• Internal promotion from L4
• 4–8 years as an engineer in a similar tech company.
• 10+ years as an engineer in the engineering department of a non-tech company.

L6 (Team Leader)

tl;dr: Engineers at this level have demonstrated the ability to own the execution of multi-half roadmaps e2e through active leadership, effective delegation, managing tradeoffs and some level of strategic thinking. They are expected to own and be accountable directly for some of the team’s OKRs. They need to be actively influencing the decision making process for the team.

Scope: Team

Time management: 50% Coding, 25% Design, 10% Cross-team Collaboration, 10% Varies by Archetype (e.g. Product engineer spends time on Product vision, Fixer engineer spends time on tooling/bug investigations)

Distribution: ~10% of engineering (company or org level)

Sample Responsibilities

Able to perform all the responsibilities of an L5 +

• Leads an entire team through its roadmap solving the hardest problems and acting as a catalyst to improve the performance of the entire team. Demonstrated track record of successfully leading at least one major initiative.
• Go-to person for an entire platform and/or multiple systems with a strong reputation beyond the immediate team. Has solved hard technical problems and their advice is sought out.
• Leads the design review process, seeking and providing constructive feedback for all team projects. Either implements the hardest parts of the system or effectively guides/mentors others on how to deliver.
• Is recognized for high quality, impactful technical contributions. Usually the person who sets up and maintains core conventions/assumptions/processes that the entire team operates under.
• Actively demonstrates best practices to other team members in order to achieve high reliability and effectively realizes those within the team context through thoughtful code reviews, appropriate testing, proper rollout, monitoring, and proactive changes that improve stability.
• Leads cross-functional projects with other teams, across disciplines (Product, Design, Ops, etc) and across platforms to solve pressing business needs. Able to lead/coordinate rollouts, phased releases and migrations of major initiatives that require cross-team coordination.
• Builds productive relationships with customers, cross-functional partners, and stakeholders.
• Succeeds in a wide range of complex situations across multiple axes: e.g. scale, uncertainty, interconnectedness and builds new technical capabilities for the team/org.
• Leads team culture; Monitors and adjusts team pace to instill urgency for success but protect from burnout. Advocates for higher product quality and engineering efficiency.
• Directly works together with the team manager to provide insights and recommendations to improve the team. May lead projects and teams directly according to the team needs.
• Participates in regular project/roadmap updates to the executive team of the org and contributes to the strategic direction, planning of the roadmap, escalating issues, and general operation excellence for the team.
• Able to clearly explain technical problems through strong communication skills (written and oral) utilizing data and strong analysis as well as providing detailed feedback and solutions.
• Leads org building activities (Recruiting, Teaching, External etc) beyond the team, actively mentors/grows multiple people and coordinates with the team manager for resourcing/headcount needs.
• Owns team roadmap complexity/duration and ensures delivery of projects on schedule. Ensures that projects are staffed appropriately and takes measures to de-risk timelines.
• Practices effective delegation and knowledge sharing amongst the team to ensure that single points of failure are avoided.

Management Goals

• Guide the engineer through tricky aspects of decision making (e.g. inclusive design review processes, project prioritization) and org building.
• Mentor them into delivering tough technical projects with large org/company impact.
• Grow them into active decision makers for the org by providing business context into technology decisions.

Recruiting

• Internal promotion from L5
• 5 years the fastest you may observe if started at L3. Typical 6–7 years.
• Speed of promotion depends on opportunities, but if you put in the effort you should be able to get there eventually.
• 8+ years as an engineer in a similar tech company.

L7 (Org Leader)

tl;dr: This level is usually a hybrid between L6 that focuses on operational execution & L8 that focuses on executive & strategic decision making and is only present in very large tech orgs that have a need for this type of intermediate level to support their growth and scale. Engineers at this level are usually working directly with the business leader of the org (an L8) usually focused on a specific technology sub-domain (e.g. all of Mobile). You can think of them as the organizational equivalent of a military “XO” focused on technology, though their role can vary based on their Archetype. Any work that an L7 engineer undertakes must be directly tied to the high level company and org OKRs or their immediate proxy metrics.

Scope: Org

Time management: 50+% Varies by Archetype (and timing/business needs), 20% Cross-team collaboration, 20% Org Building

Distribution: ~1–5% of engineering (company or org level)

Sample Responsibilities

L7+ individual contributors in general operate differently from their more streamlined and operationally focused lower-level counterparts. They tend to spend significantly more time on non-coding activities and that will require them to build up different skill sets and capabilities as well as a fundamental shift in career goals and way of working.

• Deeply understands the goals of the org and company, as well as potential engineering bottlenecks. Identifies new opportunities for the org/company and influences the appropriate people, lobbies for staffing/prioritizing these new ideas.
• Knows already a lot about how the company/org operates both organizationally and technically and is therefore able to use this knowledge to get things done.
• Formulates the short, medium, long term coherent strategic direction of the organization/company to improve products, infrastructure, processes, and the entire organization. E.g. Do we replace our MVP monolith with microservices? How/When do we switch the entire company from REST to Grpc? What are the top critical metrics that we need to monitor/report to the executive team? What critical technical capabilities are we missing that are hindering the company from increasing critical metrics by 10x.
• Leads multiple teams during the execution of the above strategic plan. Collaborates across teams and disciplines to solve problems and resolve technical debates.
• Leads design and implementation of critical infrastructure systems that allow the organization/company to scale orders of magnitude beyond current capacity.
• Ensures technical designs across the entire org/company are properly evaluated for important projects and advises teams to improve execution.
• Assesses new internal and external technologies/products that could benefit and/or threaten the company. Evaluates Build vs Buy opportunities/decisions to expand the business and technical capabilities of the company/org
• Designs and implements systems and frameworks that can succeed long term (>2 year horizons)
• Manages overwhelming system complexity by providing tools and processes that allow less experienced engineers to build and maintain them. Utilizes past experiences to simplify systems and processes to reduce operational costs.
• Possess unique skill set/specialization that gives them the ability analyze the current company strategic position and propose solutions to upcoming challenges. Stays aware of changes around the company to anticipate and prevent obstacles from hindering org performance. Understands company and industry trends and works with the org executive team to avoid insufficient or low quality technologies, designs, and business decisions.
• Has excellent reputation among peers is recognized for high quality and quantity of technical contributions. Usually has some recognition beyond the company as well for their primary domain of expertise.
• Has direct influence to senior leadership on engineering strategy and is the engineering advocate for resource planning across the org.
• Able to clearly explain complex systems in detail through strong communication skills (written and oral) utilizing data and strong analysis as well as providing detailed feedback and solutions.
• Helps the org managers improve the performance of their teams. Is a close partner and collaborator with the managers to provide feedback about teams/org performance.
• Leads org/company building activities (Recruiting (L6+ Closer), Headcount planning, Teaching, External etc) and mentors other senior engineers or managers on strategy, collaboration, influence, conflict resolution, execution, and other aspects of leadership.
• Builds productive relationships with all possible org stakeholders as well as the executive team of other orgs. Uses ideas/process to make good decisions for the company.

Management Goals

At this level engineers usually don’t receive any direct guidance and switch into more of a peer mentoring model where they continue to grow through interactions (both structured and unstructured) with other L7+ engineers.

• Mentor them by providing business context into technology decisions.
• Grow them into better understanding/applying strategic thinking frameworks and looking at the entire industry picture and macro-trends.

Recruiting

• Internal promotion from L6.
• Specific companies/orgs might never have the scope/impact/scale to support L7 (or multiple L7 if there are already some in the org).
• At that point you need to consider an internal transfer or transfer across companies (Usually to earlier stage growing companies).
• Many engineers will prefer to stay at L6 as with L7 promos also come with a very wide range of additional responsibilities. (and stress)
• 12+ years as an engineer in a similar tech company.

L8 (Company Leader)

tl;dr: This level is usually the equivalent of a CTO in a smaller company. The primary focus of an L8 is on executive & strategic decision making around the technology investments that a company makes. Engineers at this level are usually working directly with the office of the CTO or under a senior executive (Senior Director or Vice President (L9)). Any work that an L8 engineer undertakes is directly tied to the high level company OKRs and in the majority of cases the P&L statement or involves the foray of the company into new technology areas.

Scope: Company

Time management : At this level you usually get an executive assistant to help you manage your calendar and focus on what matters.

Distribution: <0.5% of engineering

Sample Responsibilities

Similar to an L7 but with scope/decisions impacting the entire company or a very large organization. (Keep in mind that you need a >200 people eng org to start justifying an L8 engineer)

• Has usually reputation and impact beyond the company, into the industry or technology area. An active champion of a particular technology or an entire industry. Seen as exceptional by your peers internally and externally.
• Represents the company as an external spokesperson and networks with similar people outside the company in related fields.
• Often identifies problems and opportunities before anybody else. Recognizes, influences, and/or resolves critical issues that may affect the company direction.
• Able to analyze company threatening problems, propose solutions and deliver results. A master in debugging extremely difficult technical problems. (Think kernel race conditions or kernel level performance optimizations that provide order of magnitude gains across the entire infrastructure)
• Has company-wide system level expertise of critical infrastructure. Usually is the one that designed and deployed that infrastructure.
• Provides expert advice to the executive team to influence setting business strategies, decisions and processes and meeting broader multi-year company goals.
• Provides expert advice to teams across the company to achieve broader company goals as well as team goals within their organization.
• Makes the people and teams around just plain better at scale. Serves as mentor across all of engineering.
• Example of what an engineer should strive to emulate across the company. A living embodiment of the company culture that drives technical, process and cultural changes to help the entire company.
• Is able to assume direct executive decision making should the need arise. Has and continues to build a track record of success in leading and coaching large teams.

Recruiting

• Internally promoted from L7.
• Very dependent on opportunities and general company growth as fundamentally there can never be multiple decision makers in each org.
• Executive recruiting of L8s in other companies.
• Executive recruiting of “stuck” L7s in other companies (see L7 notes)
• M&A

L9 (Industry Leader)

tl;dr: There are only a handful of people on Earth with the knowledge and domain expertise of an L9 engineer.

Scope: Industry

Time management : Highly efficient.

Distribution: in the 10s (… out of a 10k+ engineering org :O ) (<0.1%)

Sample Responsibilities

Similar to an L8 but with scope/decisions impacting the entire industry and usually interfacing directly with critical external stakeholders (e.g. regulators) (Think actively proposing technology related legislation)

Recruiting

• Promoted from L8.
• Executive recruiting.
• M&A

L10 (Planet Leader)

tl;dr: At the absolute pinnacle of their field. An engineer at this level is effectively advancing the entire field of Computer Science/Engineering in their domain.

Scope: Computer Science/Engineering.

Time management : Your guess is as good as mine :). This article covers some of the Google Fellows. John Carmack at Oculus was notoriously very much a hands-on coder building a lot of the initial algorithms for rendering 3D VR environments with low latency to avoid motion sickness.

Distribution: Countable with 1–2 hands. (If the company even operates at this scale)

Recruiting

• Promoted from L9.
• Executive recruiting.
• M&A

Examples

• John Carmack
• Google Fellows

References

• Square Software Engineering Career Ladder
• Levels.fyi Amazon vs Google vs Facebook
• Economic Specialization Masterclass
• Foundations of Decision Analysis: Howard, Ronald, Abbas, Ali: 9780132336246
• The New Yorker The Friendship That Made Google Huge
• Netflix Culture
• How many people are at each level of the Google engineering ladder?
• Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos: This Is How Successful People Make Such Smart Decisions

Thanks!

Many thanks to the following people for ideas, comments and encouragement on this write-up. (and Maria Roumpani for her unwavering support)

• Alex Alexakis
• Yulin Chen
• Gergely Orosz (aka The Pragmatic Engineer)
• Ioannis Papapanagiotou
• Stratos Pavlakis
• Sokratis Vidros