Skip to content
KODE Product OS

Engineer L2

Delivers features and MVP milestones on their own, with occasional guidance.

What we expect at L2

Expectations for Engineer
Scope Features and MVP milestones from story through release and cleanup. Understands how their work fits the product and the customers who use it.
Independence and judgment Works through moderately complex problems with clear goals on their own, and knows when to bring in others. Writes small proposals that state the problem, the options and a recommendation.
Technical skills Builds features across our stack (Rails models and views, Hotwire, Tailwind, background jobs, Postgres) with tests, following secure-coding practices. Writes efficient queries and debugs production issues in areas they know.
AI-assisted delivery Chooses the right tool for the task, runs a second-agent review before opening a pull request, and spots typical AI mistakes.
Quality and review Matches verification to risk, owns feature flags they add, and leaves code they touch better than they found it. Gives useful review feedback in their own area.
Communication and influence Keeps the project record current in Linear, raises risks before they become surprises, and helps onboard and pair with newer engineers.

Growing toward L3 Senior Engineer

What changes on the way to the next level. Use it in your quarterly career conversation to pick one or two areas to practice.

How to grow from Engineer toward Senior Engineer
Own complex projects

Take full ownership of larger features or small projects and drive them to completion with minimal supervision.

Example

Asked to overhaul a legacy billing module, you don't just work through the stories. You:

  • break the work into milestones, such as schema changes, a payment integration and a new invoice screen
  • handle the data migrations safely
  • define success measures, such as invoice generation time and error rate
  • ship the rollout yourself, monitor it, and fix unexpected production edge cases
Shape the design

Take part in design and architecture discussions, and propose practical, maintainable solutions that consider scale and future needs.

Example

While planning a provider scheduling feature, you suggest pulling an existing time-slot conflict check into a shared service that the web and mobile apps can both use. You:

  • write up the design with a diagram
  • walk the team through the trade-offs
  • gather feedback and align the design with team conventions
Solve problems before they're reported

Find and fix complex technical issues on your own, often before anyone notices them, including performance problems and technical debt.

Example

A key dashboard slows down after a release, and you notice before users report it. You:

  • investigate with our logging and error monitoring
  • find inefficient queries caused by a missing index
  • add the index, load only the columns you need, and cache frequent results
  • write a blameless post-mortem and add a checklist item that prevents a repeat
Mentor others

Give clear, constructive guidance to newer engineers and raise the whole team's capability.

Example

You learn a better way to use AI in your engineering work. You:

  • demo it to the team
  • document it for later
  • lead a discussion on how the team can use it
  • adopt the team's ideas to improve it
Create business impact

Understand what a project is for, spot ways to give customers more value, and suggest and deliver those improvements.

Example

While building a patient intake form, you notice many fields could be filled in from existing records. You:

  • suggest it to the product manager, backed by usage data
  • ship it and measure the form completion rate
  • propose a follow-up that prepares the data ahead of scheduled appointments
Collaborate across functions

Work with product managers, designers and other engineers to turn business needs into technical solutions.

Example

On an appointment scheduling feature, you:

  • flag in the product and design review that appointment lengths need to vary
  • work with design to update the screens for it
  • write a technical plan covering model changes, calendar integration and rollout risks
  • coordinate delivery and help check the behavior in production
AI-assisted delivery

Design AI-assisted workflows the team can reuse, such as prompts, context and review steps.

At every level

Every engineer's work gets reviewed, whatever their level, and leading a project is an assignment, not a promotion. Read more on the engineering overview.