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

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

This article focuses on the level F.

Level F

You are a leader for Alan.

• Scope of Impact: You consistently identify and solve Alan’s hardest member and business problems. You may own a large scope or tackle high ambiguity. You impact the trajectory of a large department or several departments.
• Expertise: You understand finely and demonstrate how to deploy your proficiency efficiently, using both soft and hard skills. You may be an expert in redefining key technical abilities for Alan.
• Leadership: You make Alan faster. You enable and inspire your peers through your output, and a big part of your impact is indirect.

Scope of impact

You consistently identify and solve Alan’s hardest member and business problems. You may own a large scope or tackle high ambiguity. You impact the trajectory of a large department or several departments.

Identify & Own

• You open discussions that would not be addressed otherwise.
• You are fluent in the company strategy and priorities and organize your work in and outside your department around them.
• You make difficult scoping and prioritization decisions fast and with strong conviction. You align people and are fully responsible for the success of the decision and its implications when not everyone agrees.
• When you own a topic, you know how to use clear communication to keep people focused on the target, give a clear timeline and illustrate the impact of the work.

Solve & Impact the trajectory

• You know how to make big customer and business problems go away. Your work is not done until the full impact has been realized and the problem disappears.
• You consistently use your expertise to increase awareness of strategic problems that impact the direction of department roadmaps.
• You are a trusted member of the engineering team, recognized for bringing well-thought-out opinions and clarifying trade-offs in strategic decisions.

Large Scope & High ambiguity

• You develop and deliver technical strategies that start from the strategy pack and span multiple quarters to a year that involve or impact many engineers.
• You may be responsible for engineering success in a large department or multiple departments, you may own some of our biggest technical decisions (designing foundational systems, choosing core technologies)
• The work you deliver frequently brings us materially closer to a company priority and has a material impact on multiple departments or multiple product teams.

Expertise

You understand finely and demonstrate how to deploy your proficiency efficiently, using both soft and hard skills. You may be an expert redefining key technical abilities for Alan.

Soft and hard skills

• You are fully fluent in our technical stack and can be recognized as an expert on parts of it. This allows you to reason, explain and adapt various large components with targeted high impact.
• You have excellent judgment of technical risk and constantly find ways to minimize it or remove it from our stack.
• Your communication skills allow you to proactively engage with peers at any level of the company.

Redefining key technical abilities

• You use your technical expertise, influence and speed to bring new technical abilities to Alan.
• You are comfortable designing and implementing technical systems that materially impact the capabilities of multiple departments.

Leadership

You make Alan faster. You enable and inspire your peers through your output, and a big part of your impact is indirect.

Enable & Inspire

• You are a strong technical mentor and/or coach and are comfortable helping level E Alaners grow to level F.
• You exemplify Alan’s leadership principles, using them effectively to coach other Alaners and give feedback on unwanted behavior.
• You are recognized as a strong advocate for change through your technical excellence or impact.

Your impact is indirect

• You master distributed ownership. You focus on empowering people, making sure they are set up for success.
• You do not do everything yourself for scopes you own, you gather the right people and assure that we are moving towards a solution.

Engineering team impact

You are a leader in the engineering team and are enabling its success over time

• You identify and drive ambitious and ambiguous topics impacting the entire engineering team and beyond.
• You are helping the engineering team grow by pushing and exemplifying strong accountability to learn from incidents and mistakes.
• You are effective at attracting very senior (E+) engineers to join Alan and mentoring when they join.
• You consistently improve our recruiting process to allow us to keep raising the bar.
• You may coach more than two Alaners and in particular you are comfortable coaching coaches, team leads and department leads.