Software Engineer (SE)

Note: as one progresses along a career path, one should possess and show all qualities of levels below.

Years of Experience: 3-5

Knowledge & Technical Skill

• Able to own small- to medium-sized features from technical design through completion, making well-reasoned design decisions and trade-offs

• Is gaining knowledge of best practices in coding standards, core architecture, documentation, automated testing, debugging

• Comfortable designing data structures and schemas

• Experienced with automated testing (unit, integration) and contributes to test coverage for primary platform(s) managed by team

• Able to debug and solve problems in own code or other's code, with support or guidance

• Self-sufficient in at least one large area of the codebase with a high level understanding of other components in the system

• Developing expertise in a core language and / or technology, and gaining awareness of others (eg, frontend, messaging, infrastructure, etc)

Impact & Output

• Fully understands the business cases and functional / non-functional (e.g., performance, security, accessibility) requirements supported by team's owned features. Demonstrates awareness of business value by proposing new features or approaches

• Is gaining experience in breaking down tasks, planning, and cutting unnecessary scope to maximize business value and minimize technical risk and debt within a reasonable timeframe

• Able to effectively estimate work

• Capable of prioritizing tasks and makes progress without significant feedback from more senior engineers

• Requires detailed guidance to solve complex or new types of assignments

Communication

• Clearly and effectively communicates with colleagues (across all mediums: PRs, Slack, email, in-person/video chat, etc)

• Can clearly communicate technical information in a non-technical manner

• Confidently lead conversations and meetings across teams to support the work as needed

• Anticipates what might be needed by colleagues

• Gives timely, helpful feedback to peers and offers guidance in PRs

• Asks productive questions to thoroughly understand requirements / user stories

• Can identify contradictory requirements and suggest resolutions

• Creates clear and concise sets of documentation around projects worked on for technical and non-technical audiences

• Knows when to ask for help in order to get themselves unblocked and avoids getting caught up in unimportant details

• Resolves conflict effectively

Leadership

• Comfortable with sharing knowledge with other engineers (for example, via blog posts, lunchtime brown-bag sessions, etc)

• Can conceive of and implement significant improvements to the codebase

• Proactively extracts insights and trends from day-to-day work, and communicates those trends in a clear and concise

• Can manage and support software engineer intern(s)