engineering rubric
· 1min · career
| Level | Approach | Sphere of Influence |
|---|---|---|
| Associate | Directed execution | Self |
| Mid-Level | Guided autonomy | Team |
| Senior | Delegated ownership | Org-wide |
| Staff+ | Systemic Leadership | Company-wide |
Associate [Directed Execution]
Sphere of Influence: Self
Focus: Learn the craft, follow guidance, and build foundational skills.
Expectation: A short tenure of rapid growth where the engineer needs to build their business acumen and understand how to work within a team.
- Technical
- Learns and applies core technologies with support
- Writes functional, maintainable code with guidance
- Works to understand basic testing philosophy and how to write relevant tests
- Debugs with pair support and may need help diagnosing problems
- Follows established patterns, doesn’t create new ones
- Receives detailed feedback and adjusts accordingly
- Strategic
- Learns to ask clarifying questions
- Communicates progress and blockers regularly
- Follows task priorities set by others, prioritization not expected
- Developing an understanding of team goals and how their work fits in
Mid-Level [Guided Autonomy]
Sphere of Influence: Team
Focus: Own individual tasks alone or features with guidance, contribute to team health, and learn to navigate trade-offs.
Expectation: This is where an engineer becomes well-rounded both in their organization and able to be successful outside the org. They are generally not specialists, but they may have a preference for where they want to work in the stack. While gaining technical skill, they understand that the strategic skills are as important and unlock their path to senior.
- Technical
- Delivers end-to-end features with autonomy (trust but verify)
- Reviews code for correctness and maintainability
- Writes test plans for their features, incorporating functional, integration, e2e, and manual testing
- Begins identifying small improvements in code or process
- Seeks feedback proactively from peers and leaders
- Provides feedback within the team
- Strategic
- Contributes to task breakdowns and estimates while beginning to navigate ambiguity
- Starts building stakeholder relationships and works to unblock themselves
- Helps unblock teammates through support and documentation
- Learns to prioritize within a sprint based on team needs, understanding right-hand column value
- Participates in discussions around product/engineering trade-offs
Senior [Delegated Ownership]
Sphere of Influence: Engineering Org
Focus: Drive outcomes across teams and make technical decisions aligned with strategy.
Expectation: Senior engineer is a terminal title, meaning an individual can have a career never moving above this without organizational consequences. They have seen and dealt with business and technical issues of varied scope, solved complex problems within their own team and the greater engineering organization, and they work to improve the org through technical and process improvements. Technical skill alone is not enough to be a successful senior.
- Technical
- Leads design and implementation of complex systems
- Makes trade-off decisions with minimal guidance
- Identifies and addresses tech debt across projects
- Mentors teammates and improves team practices
- Communicates technical requirements and tradeoffs to a non-technical audience
- Strategic
- Prioritizes work based on business impact and risk
- Facilitates alignment across teams and functions
- Advocates for long-term technical health alongside immediate delivery
- Guides teams through ambiguity and complexity
- Presents business outcomes from technical projects
Staff+ [Systemic Leadership]
Sphere of Influence: Company
Focus: Set direction, build alignment, and elevate the entire company’s technical and strategic thinking.
Expectation: A staff engineer is both a thought leader and technical executor, the solver of large problems requiring multiple teams. They must be able to communicate needs to the Executive Leadership Team, drive transformative projects through technical execution and adoption, and then leverage a handoff to avoid permanent ownership. They have to know when to stand fast and when to give ground on technical needs, all while staying on the forefront of what new technology will be useful versus dangerous hype projects.
- Technical
- Defines and evangelizes technical strategy across the company
- Makes architecture decisions that scale across teams and domains
- Anticipates systemic risks and guides teams in mitigation
- Shapes what expert-level engineering looks like at the org level
- Strategic
- Connects engineering priorities to company objectives
- Balances short-term delivery and long-term vision across the company
- Builds and maintains strong cross-functional relationships
- Influences executives and shapes company-wide priorities