Staff Engineer L4
Raises the bar across several projects or a whole area of the platform.
What we expect at L4
| Scope | Several projects or a significant part of the platform at once. Connects technical work to product strategy and customer needs. |
|---|---|
| Independence and judgment | Spots problems before they are assigned and works through ambiguous problems that span projects. Turns long-term goals into small, iterative steps, and takes extra care with decisions that are hard to reverse. |
| Technical skills | Designs systems that span projects or services, including the integrations between our applications and the services we're building, with the reliability distributed systems need. Owns architecture, infrastructure and deployment concerns for an area, including our Fly.io and PlanetScale platforms, and sets patterns others reuse. Still writes code, balancing hands-on work with technical leadership. |
| AI-assisted delivery | Sets AI practice and guardrails for the team and measures whether they help. |
| Quality and review | Owns cross-cutting reliability, security and performance concerns, works with our security team, and guides others on security issues. Leads the response to critical incidents. Reviews across the whole codebase. |
| Communication and influence | High influence across engineering and product. Sets technical direction others build on and champions a blameless culture that learns from mistakes. Direct reports are not required. |
Growing toward L5 Principal 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.
| Company-wide impact |
Deliver solutions that set the standard for scale and cost-effectiveness, making the hard trade-offs between opportunity and complexity. |
|---|---|
| Define the technical vision |
Set and explain KODE's long-term technical vision and strategy, and shape roadmaps across the organization. |
| Drive innovation |
Explore and adopt new technology where it helps, and define best practices for the company. |
| Work with executives |
Translate complex technical ideas into business implications, and influence strategic decisions. |
| Mentor leaders |
Mentor senior and staff engineers and build KODE's pipeline of technical leaders. |
| Solve the problems no one else can |
Consistently take on the most ambiguous technical problems with the biggest business stakes. |
| AI-assisted delivery |
Define how AI changes the way KODE builds, and keep it aligned with our security and compliance commitments. |
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.