Tldr Of Getting Promoted To Senior Software Engineer
2 min readDec 13, 2021
Senior Software Engineers play a vital role in determining the product’s direction and actively participate in the development of key business-critical features. This blog is intended to serve as a resource for aspiring software engineers who wish to succeed in software engineering and advance to the level of seasoned software engineers.
Own Career Conversations
- Take the necessary initiative for your career development and progression through 1:1s and career conversations with your manager and other senior SDEs.
- Document career goals in detail, highlighting key aspects like complexity/ambiguity and overall growth in the current function beyond project delivery.
Delivery Excellence
- Successfully launch software that impacts a major portion of a product or business.
- Ideate with customers, stakeholders, peers and define problems and solution roadmap.
- Lead the design, implementation, and delivery of successful large-scale, critical software.
Operational Excellence
- Own responsibilities for optimizing hardware utilization for the team’s services.
- Review the metrics/alarms of team’s software and offer tools to make service maintenance easier.
- Conduct Operational Readiness Audits of the team’s systems on a regular basis. Propose constructive solutions to reoccurring issues addressing the root causes.
Engineering Excellence
- Have a thorough understanding of the team’s work and try to enhance consistency and integration between your software and related applications on a regular basis.
- Propose and develop decoupling/reusable platform components. Take the lead in finding and resolving ambiguous issues, architectural flaws, or areas of innovation.
- Make improvements to development and testing practices. Ensure that your designs are scalable and extensible.
Peer Development
- Mentor and coach new engineers on how your team’s software is built, works, is secure, and fits into the wider picture.
- Participate and drive brainstorming and knowledge-sharing sessions.
- Participate actively in the hiring process. Assist with the recruitment and interviewing of new team members.
- Recognize discordant views and take part in constructive dialogue to resolve them.
Personal Development
- Focus on learning and understanding new design patterns, software systems that can be used to improve the software and operations of the team.
- Become a subject matter expert in 2–3 key areas of the software used by the team.
- Participate actively in code reviews, design discussions, and team planning.
Influence Beyond Team
- Exhibit technical influence over 1 or 2 teams, either through a collaborative software effort or by driving software engineering best practises to increase their productivity and effectiveness.
- Make informed contributions to team priorities and technical trade-off considerations to influence company/business strategy.
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