Senior Engineer

Core Competencies

• You own tasks independently and can execute and debug medium and hard problems fairly independently.
• You are able to design modules/parts of a solution independently and review them as needed by a Staff/Principal engineer from your team or from another team by providing sufficient context.
• You own large enough features/areas of a system entirely and gain mastery and depth in those areas. You are the person to go to for solving issues in that subsystem/feature set that you own.
• You are pretty good at code/system design reviews of engineers who are still learning this while you are respectful, thoughtful, and not being too pedantic. You approach anyone who is learning this with empathy and provide them with guidance and pointers to get better at code reviews when they start out.
• You are aware of top areas which can be improved in terms of code quality/system design/configuration design etc. and work constantly to improve them. Sometimes you need to make a case of such improvements to customers and teams you interact with and you follow a methodist approach to do this.
• For every work item you finish/work on in a given day/week, you also spend time to understand the architecture of the system as a whole and understand them to a good degree.
• You understand that most problems in our technology space are multi-disciplinary and involve multiple layers of the stack. You enable your teams to work ahead of the tasks to identify and read/learn about those areas and be prepared with a plan of action.
• You have a broad understanding of more than a handful of areas and have a deep understanding of 3+ areas (broad is the horizontal bar & depth is the vertical bar in the T-shaped skills). Your goal is to achieve mastery in 3+ areas and continue to increase the breadth of your understanding by learning new areas closest to your work.
• You have a fairly good understanding of areas you are excellent, good and average at and are working to improve on the good and average areas. This is something you regularly discuss with your mentor who is experienced and has been there and done that.
• Clear communicator: Know your audience before you communicate. An update presented at an executive level on a task will be differently worded than to a colleague or your peer. The reason is that context matters. Getting into technical details with the person who does not work with you on a daily basis will most likely be boring or will not get you the necessary eyeballs needed on it.

Functional Competencies

Management

• You can be a single point of contact from the customer’s point of view for a team of a few engineers and can own their delivery. When you own the delivery of a small team, you are aware that you are not the one doing everything but enabling others to be successful on their own.
• You are clear with estimates of complex tasks and are learning to estimate modules etc. with a fair degree of accuracy.
• You are able to understand priorities between modules and team members and their tasks.
• You are able to make a case for a specific feature/technical debt item in front of stakeholders including customer teams.

Delighting People

• You demonstrate openness to others’ ideas. You adapt their communication style to most effectively communicate. You believe in effectively and accurately sharing credit for ideas and collaborative efforts.
• You are mentoring at least 2-3 associate engineers and 1-3 engineers - from your experiences of learning and building things. You are happy to jump onto a pair debugging session once in a while to help them think and learn better.

Organization Building

• You are an instrumental part of hiring programs and look out for engineers with potential and skills and bet on them. You know that someone bet you at some point in your career and that is what has got you here. You are able to interview engineers and associate engineers effectively and highlight their strengths and weaknesses clearly as part of the interviewing process.
• You are contributing to at least one organization-wide initiative this could be any one of the following (this list is indicative and not meant to be exhaustive).
  • Writing blogs or case studies of the work done by you or helping do the same to a junior engineer.
  • Teaching about a new technology/tool you worked on or learnt recently to rest of engineering organization.
  • Helping improve a training module, an on-boarding process - basically anything that can make us better as an organization.

Social Capital

• You actively contribute to community-level activities and initiatives such as meetups, conferences and social causes.

Behavioral Competencies

Enabling Traits

• Tenacity: A lot of times the required work/task at hand would need you to dig deep and not give up. We would expect you to do that.
• Astute: We would expect you to be able to understand the real ask from the customer/colleagues and help resolve them. A lot of times your colleagues and or the customer pass on information but the real problem to solve is somewhere else.
• Problem solver: The actual blockers/problems are solved on the ground. We would expect you to try and resolve problems on your own first before you raise concerns with the architect/customer. A good way of asking a question is by explaining what have YOU done to resolve the problem yourself? The answer to that shows that you have tried to remove the hurdle yourself and have an opinion about it.
• Connected InfraCloud core values: Being Ahead of the Curve & Strive to Delight

Broad Indicators

As a broad range indicator, your time and energies are roughly split in the following proportions.

Split of responsibilities in the role	Core: ~50-65%
	Management: ~10-15%
	Delighting People: ~5-15%
	Organization Building: ~5-10%
	Social Capital: ~0-10%
	Enabling Traits: We expect these traits to be demonstrated consistently in your role.
Approximate Tenure in this role (This is not meant to be exact tenure - some people move up in half time and some take 100% more for example)	~2-3 year