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.