🧑‍💻 Software Engineer - Level L3 (2-3 Years Experience)

🛠️ Technical Skills

📝 Code Quality & Testing

🖊️ Writing Code

• Consistently writes production-ready code that is easily testable, easily understood by other developers, and accounts for edge cases and errors.
• Understands when it is appropriate to leave comments but biases towards self-documenting code.
• Evaluates and implements design patterns where required and actively improves and deprecates old code.
• Involves actively in database schema design and code optimizations.

🧪 Testing

• Understands the testing pyramid, and writes unit tests as well as higher level tests in accordance with it.
• Always writes tests to handle expected edge cases and errors gracefully, as well as happy paths.
• Integration testing and suite-based testing are expected at this level.

🔄 PR Practices

• Follows PR practices defined by the engineering team, such as PR size, PR description, PR merge time, etc.
• Conducts thorough reviews of PRs and suggests 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.).
• Reviews peer documentation and suggests changes.

🐞 Debugging & Observability

🔎 Debugging

• Proficient at using systematic debugging to diagnose all issues located to a single application.
• Uses systematic debugging to diagnose cross-service issues, sometimes with help from more senior engineers.

🚨 Monitoring

• Is aware of the engineering organization's monitoring philosophy.
• Helps tune and change the monitoring on their team accordingly.
• Is aware of the operational data for their team’s domain and uses it as a basis for suggesting stability and performance improvements.

🏗️ Software Design & Architecture

🧠 Understanding Code

• Understands their team's domain at a high level and can gather sufficient context to work productively within it.
• Has expertise in a portion of their team's domain.

🏛️ Software Architecture

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

🛡️ Security

• Approaches all engineering work with a security lens.
• Actively looks for security vulnerabilities both in the code and when providing peer reviews.

🚀 Delivery & Effectiveness

📦 Incremental Value Delivery

🔨 Work Breakdown

• Before beginning work, reviews tasks critically and ensures they’re appropriately sized for incremental delivery. Does so independently.
• Knows when to consult (e.g. dependencies, assumptions).
• Can explain and rationalize a work breakdown to the team, relating it to prioritization.

🎯 Prioritisation, dependencies

• Ensures tasks are prioritised correctly, identifies and confirms their own and their counterpart's commitments upon inbound and outbound dependencies.

🌪️ Dealing with Ambiguity

• Handles risk, change, and uncertainty within their personal scope of work effectively.
• 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 atleast a week prior.
• Max Defelection of delivery time (10%)

💰 Economic Thinking

• When taking action, weighs cost and value in order to take the most economic action.
• Uses this thinking in their own work, and to make suggestions to teammates.

🤝 Feedback, Communication & Collaboration

🔄 Feedback

• Delivers praise and constructive feedback to their team, teammates, and manager in a useful manner.
• Delivers feedback to their team's business stakeholders when opportunities arise.
• 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

• Communicates effectively, clearly, concisely in written and verbal form on both technical and non-technical subjects.
• Actively listens to others and ensures they are understood.

📚 Knowledge Sharing

• Understands their team's domain, shares their knowledge frequently with their teammates and contributes to their team's documentation.
• Watches out for opportunities to share knowledge and encourages others to do the same.
• Actively participate and holdcode walkthroughs with peers and maintain track of horizontal and vertical learning

🤝 Collaboration

👥 Teamwork

• Often helps their teammates overcome obstacles, resolve blockers, and complete work tasks.

💼 Relationship building

• Works to build strong relationships with their teammates, manager, as well as their teams' relevant business stakeholders.

🕊️ Handling Disagreement

• Encourages their teammates to openly share their opinions and contribute to discussions in a respectful manner.
• Approaches disagreement 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 decisions and outcomes.

🧭 Driving Alignment

• Has conversations based on company strategy and engineering organization priorities with their teammates to ensure team alignment.
• Strongly oriented towards goals and ensures their team is continuously working towards their shared goals.

💭 Process Thinking

• Thinks about team practices and processes and regularly discusses improvements with their team, sometimes collaborating with others to improve engineering organizational practices and processes.

🤝 Facilitation

• Facilitates discussions within their team, ensuring everyone has an opportunity to share their opinion and be heard.

👨‍🏫 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 thorough understanding of their team's domain, and how it contributes to overall business strategy.
• Has a basic understanding of adjacent teams' business domains.

🚀 Strategic Work

• Understands the company's engineering strategy.
• Usually involved in discussions about the implications for their team.

🎯 Product Thinking

• Thoroughly understands the business model in relation to their current product focus area.
• Sometimes participates in roadmap feedback with the product team.
• Often interacts with stakeholders and understands the requirement from the stakeholder perspective.