I had a chat with one of our senior engineers recently. They were frustrated about the number of meetings on their calendar. They told me: “I’m a senior, I know what to do. Just let me work”. Out of curiosity, we ran the numbers. They were spending exactly 30 minutes more in meetings per sprint compared to their last job. But the conversation stuck with me.
I know what to do.
Is that what makes someone a senior engineer? I looked closer at how this engineer was working. I asked for feedback from product managers and other developers. The reality didn’t match the title. This engineer was taking on all the hard tasks themselves. They were creating knowledge silos. Tickets assigned to them sat empty with no comments. There was no documentation explaining the how or the why of their decisions. It made me sit down and reread our career ladders. I wanted to clearly answer the question: What does it actually mean to be a Senior Software Engineer here? Here is what I found. It is a baseline I want to have for us all to align on.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
It’s about outcomes, not just code
Writing good code is the absolute minimum requirement. But when you reach the Senior or Tech Lead level, the job changes. You transition from executing tasks to owning solutions. Our Senior ladder states that a senior developer:
reliably owns the end-to-end design, development and rollout for entire initiatives.
This means thinking through risks before you write a single line of code. There is a phrase in our documentation: “mountains are small from far away”. A junior developer might just start typing. A senior knows that big projects hide unexpected problems. You plan for them. You also work with Product Managers to discuss trade-offs. If a feature is too complex for the value it brings, a senior engineer speaks up and proposes a simpler alternative.
The “coder in the corner” is a trap
Hoarding work is not a senior behavior. If you build a complex system but no one else on the team understands it, you haven’t helped us. You have created a bottleneck. A real senior engineer leaves a trail. You write documentation. You leave comments on your tickets so the rest of the squad knows the status. You communicate. Our Senior ladder expects you to
divide projects so that they are addressable by multiple developers.
You should be breaking down big tasks and defining interfaces so your teammates can work in parallel. You don’t do it all yourself. You build the scaffolding so the team can build with you.
Communication is the Work
Let’s talk about the meeting complaint. It is easy to view meetings as a distraction from your “real” job. But at a senior level, aligning with your team is your job. You have to collaborate with Product and Design early in the process. You have to explain technical limits to non-technical people. Our Tech Lead ladder notes that a Tech Lead must
get cross-team buy-in for solutions.
You cannot build consensus or champion a new architecture if you refuse to talk to people. We want you to have focused time to code. But hiding from the team to write code in a vacuum damages the product.
The multiplier effect
Your impact is no longer measured just by your own commit history. It is measured by how much you elevate the people around you. John Allspaw (the former CTO of Etsy) wrote a defining article on this. He argued that true seniority is about engineering maturity. It means having a “generosity of spirit”, seeking out constructive criticism and actively lifting the skills of everyone around you. If you are a Senior or Tech Lead, you are a mentor. You use code reviews as teaching moments, not just to point out formatting errors. You let junior developers struggle a bit with a problem so they can learn, providing a safety net rather than just giving them the answer.
Final thoughts
Being a senior engineer means stepping up. You take ownership of the messy parts. You deal with ambiguity. You write the docs, you leave the comments and you talk to your team. I want us to build a culture where we multiply each other’s efforts and make sure we are actually acting like seniors, not just wearing the title.