🧑‍💻 Software Engineer - Level L2

🛠️ Technical Skills

📝 Code Quality & Testing

🖊️ Writing Code

• Consistently writes functions that are easily testable, easily understood by other developers, and accounts for edge cases and errors.
• Writes comprehensive function and class documentation.
• Conducts impact analysis beforehand with assistance from a senior engineer for any modifications.

🧪 Testing

• Understands the testing pyramid and writes unit tests in accordance with it, as well as higher level tests with guidance from more senior engineers.
• Always tests expected edge cases and errors, in addition to the happy path.

🔄 PR Practices

• Adheres to PR practices defined by the engineering team, including PR size, PR description, PR merge time, etc.
• Conducts thorough reviews of PRs and provides constructive suggestions for changes and modifications.

📚 Documentation

• Follows the documentation process set by the organization and ensures it is reviewed by seniors before publishing. This includes in-code comments and external documentation (Confluence, Google Docs, etc.).

🐞 Debugging & Observability

🔎 Debugging

• Proficient at using systematic debugging to diagnose all issues within a single application.
• Capable of using systematic debugging to diagnose cross-service issues, sometimes with assistance from more senior engineers.

🚨 Monitoring

• Understands the engineering organization's monitoring philosophy and is aware of the operational data for their team’s domain.
• Expected to have proficiency with monitoring tools at this level. Also expected to set up basic alerts for monitoring.

🏗️ Software Design & Architecture

🧠 Understanding Code

• Understands a portion of the team's domain, can gain sufficient context to work productively in that portion.
• Actively participates in system design exercises and documentation at this level is expected.

🏛️ Software Architecture

• Consistently designs functions/components/services that are aligned with the overall system architecture.
• Utilizes abstractions and code isolation effectively.

🛡️ Security

• Understands the importance of security.
• Familiar with common exploits such as SQL injection, XSS, and others and ensures their code prevents these exploits.
• Utilizes this knowledge to ask more senior engineers for help on making decisions that may have security implications.
• Should actively follows secure coding practices atleast on the tech stack and ensures the same practices are followed within the team.

🚀 Delivery & Effectiveness

📦 Incremental Value Delivery

🔨 Work Breakdown

• Before beginning work, reviews tasks critically and ensures they’re appropriately sized for incremental delivery.
• Typically does so independently, occasionally with help from teammates or manager.

🎯 Prioritisation, dependencies

• Ensures tasks are prioritised correctly, and that dependencies are noted.
• Typically does so independently, occasionally with help from teammates or manager.

🌪️ Dealing with Ambiguity

• Usually handles risk, change, and uncertainty within their personal scope of work effectively.
• Usually decides and acts responsibly without having the total picture during routine business, and when in high pressure situations.

📆 Self Organization

⏳ Reliability, delivery accountability

• Ensures their commitments are realistic, understands their priority and urgency, and delivers upon them accordingly.
• Anticipates and communicates blockers, delays, and cost ballooning for their work before they require escalation.
• Ensures expectations within their team are clarified between all parties involved.
• Communicate timelines slip at least a week prior.
• Max Deflection of delivery time (15%)

💰 Economic Thinking

• When taking action, weighs cost and value in order to take the most economic action with help from more senior engineers.
• Sometimes uses this type of thinking to make suggestions to teammates. (Economic thinking atleast in term of system resources and cloud resources if not orginazation resources).

🤝 Feedback Communication Collaboration

🔄 Feedback

🗣️ Delivering Feedback

• Delivers praise and constructive feedback to their team, teammates, and manager in a useful manner.

🎧 Seeking and Receiving Feedback

• Actively seeks out feedback from their teammates and manager, and works to use feedback that they receive as a tool for growth.

📣 Communication

💬 Effective Communication

• Usually communicates effectively, clearly, concisely and in an audience-oriented way in written and verbal form both technical and non technical subjects, to their teammates.
• Actively listens to others and ensures they are understood.
• Pays attention to nonverbal communication.

📚 Knowledge Sharing

• Understands their work domain, shares their knowledge frequently with their teammates and contributes to their team's documentation.
• Watches out for opportunities to share knowledge.

🤝 Collaboration

👥 Teamwork

• Sometimes helps their teammates overcome obstacles, resolve blockers, and complete work tasks.
• Gives or shares credit where due.

💼 Relationship building

• Works to build strong relationships with their teammates, manager, and product counterpart.

🕊️ Handling Disagreement

• Openly shares their opinions and contributes to discussions in a respectful manner.
• Approaches disagreement with their teammates non-defensively with inquisitiveness.
• Uses contradictory opinions as a basis for constructive, productive conversations.
• Is open to changing their perspective and plans based on others' input.

🎖️ Leadership

🤔 Decision Making

• Strives to be objective and reflects on their own biases when making decisions.
• Holds themselves accountable for decision and outcomes.

🧭 Driving Alignment

• Has conversations based on company strategy and engineering organization priorities with their teammates when appropriate.
• Strongly oriented towards goals and works towards their team's goals.

💭 Process Thinking

• Regularly thinks about team practices and processes and proposes improvements in retrospectives or through other channels.

🤝 Facilitation - NA

👨‍🏫 Mentoring

• Mentors their junior teammates in an open, respectful, flexible, empathetic manner.
• Seeks out mentoring opportunities specifically to create team redundancy and backfill ability.

🎯 Strategic Impact

📈 Business Acumen

• Has a basic understanding of their team's domain, and how it contributes to overall business strategy.

🚀 Strategic work

• Understands the organization's engineering strategy.

🎯 Product Thinking

• Understands product area of focus, how it fits into the overall business, and sometimes makes improvement suggestions for it.
• Sometimes interacts with stakeholders and understands the requirement from stakeholder perspective.