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KODE Product OS

Senior Engineer L3

Leads projects end to end and makes the people around them better.

What we expect at L3

Expectations for Senior Engineer
Scope Whole projects, often as project lead, including requirements, milestones, effort estimates, target dates and release plans. Understands how customers use the product and how the project serves the business.
Independence and judgment Shapes scope with product and makes sound trade-offs. Works through complex, somewhat ambiguous problems to deliver concrete, actionable solutions, and writes proposals for large work that deliver in small steps.
Technical skills Designs complex features from front end to back end. Owns database design, performance and security in their projects, debugs production issues across services, and chooses the right testing approach.
AI-assisted delivery Designs AI-assisted workflows the team can reuse, such as prompts, context and review steps.
Quality and review Leads by example on quality and makes sure the team's work meets the bar, including release verification. Reviews across areas, for design as well as correctness.
Communication and influence Mentors other engineers, takes part in interviewing and hiring, and explains decisions in writing that people can follow later.

Growing toward L4 Staff 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 Senior Engineer toward Staff Engineer
Widen your impact

Deliver solutions that make future work faster across several projects or product areas, and keep options open without adding needless complexity.

Example

You see that the current architecture slows several projects down. You:

  • design an architecture that speeds up delivery for everyone
  • create shared patterns and libraries others can reuse
  • add monitoring that benefits all of engineering
  • plan a migration that keeps disruption to ongoing work low
Lead technical strategy

Lead significant technical initiatives and architectural decisions that affect several systems, and drive adoption of practices with wide benefit.

Example

You lead efforts such as:

  • evaluating new Rails features and proposing where to adopt them
  • building thorough monitoring and alerting
  • designing backup and disaster recovery for critical healthcare data
  • setting security practices for protected health information
  • writing technical roadmaps that support business goals
Influence across teams

Shape the technical direction of work beyond your own project and act as a bridge between groups.

Example

Working across groups, you:

  • find opportunities to share code between applications
  • establish design patterns others find valuable
  • facilitate discussions that solve hard integration problems
  • lead architecture reviews that include everyone affected
Mentor at scale

Guide many engineers at once and build a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing.

Example

You scale your mentoring by:

  • improving onboarding for new engineers
  • setting code review standards and helping other senior engineers mentor well
  • running workshops on hard topics such as domain modeling
  • building internal tools and documentation that make everyone more productive
Find value proactively

Use KODE's business direction to improve how projects are defined, and deliver improvements even outside your direct ownership.

Example

Knowing where the business is heading, you:

  • find technical debt that will slow future features
  • propose infrastructure that supports much larger growth
  • suggest technical capabilities that could become advantages
  • prioritize technical work by business impact, not only technical interest
Solve the hardest problems

Take on problems that span several areas or need new approaches.

Example

A core workflow takes more than 30 seconds at peak hours. You:

  • investigate across the database, cache and background job queue
  • find N+1 queries, cache misses and a saturated job queue
  • plan the fixes, including indexes, query changes, cache warming and job priorities
  • coordinate infrastructure, product communication and load testing to release safely
  • add dashboards, alerts and an incident playbook for next time
AI-assisted delivery

Set AI practice and guardrails for the team, and measure whether they help.

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.