Behavioural signals for senior engineers

Amazon’s page for SDE III candidates gives half of a 60-minute phone screen to questions about its Leadership Principles, and its SDE II page expects engineers to mentor and guide others and to trade feature work against operational work. A story that would earn a strong rating at mid level can still fall short at senior level, because what the interviewer listens for has changed.

Senior signals are about the scopescope: The size of the work you own and decide about, from a single task to a feature, a system or several teams' systems. The levels of a career ladder differ mainly in scope and in how much direction you need. of the problem and how far your influence reached, not about harder code. A senior story carries five: scope, ambiguity, influence, mentoring and trade-offs. Below are the public career ladderscareer ladder: An employer's written description of what each level of a role is expected to do and how far its work reaches; also called a career framework. Some employers publish theirs. that describe them, and one answer that shows all five.

Five signals separate a senior story from a mid-level one

Public career ladders show what changes. Dropbox’s engineering framework moves from IC3 to IC4. IC3 owns projects for a team’s quarterly goals and solves “ambiguous, open-ended problems”; IC4 delivers “ongoing business impact across a team, product capability, or technical system”, helps teammates grow into the next level and drives work beyond its own team. The UK Civil Service describes the same climb for decisions: entry grades use guidance and ask colleagues, while Grades 6 and 7 reach conclusions from complex and sometimes incomplete evidence. Google’s guide to structured interviewing calls the individual contributor’s version “emergent leadership”Google's name for the leadership of people who manage nobody: taking initiative, working across teams and a steady drive to develop themselves..

An interviewer hears those ladders as five level signalslevel signal: A part of an answer that tells an interviewer what level of work it shows, such as the scope of the problem, the ambiguity you faced, your influence on others, your mentoring or a trade-off you made.:

• Scope: the work spans a system, a product area or several months, not a single task.
• Ambiguity: you started without a clear answer and decided what to do.
• Influence: people outside your own work changed what they did because of you.
• Mentoring: someone else became better at the work because of what you did.
• Trade-offs: you said what you gave up, and why it was worth it.

None of the five needs a manager’s title. Each is a fact about one occasion that an interviewer can write down and score, which is why a senior candidate prepares them story by story rather than as a list of qualities.

Kabir, an invented backend engineer with six years of experience, is asked about a technical change he drove. Step through his answer and watch the interviewer’s notes:

The drawing shows the whole scene; its 7 steps are listed below.

Every step as text

1. The question. The interviewer asks Kabir, an invented backend engineer with six years of experience, about a technical change he drove. The notes are empty: nothing yet says what level of work this was.
2. Scope. Kabir opens with the problem: three payment services each ran their own retry queue, and between them about 40 failed payments a week were never retried. It spans three services, not one ticket.
3. Ambiguity. Nobody owned retries across the services, so he spent the first week measuring which queue lost payments before proposing anything. He decided what the problem was before solving it.
4. Influence. He proposed one shared queue, wrote a two-page proposal and agreed the cut-over order with the other two teams' leads. People outside his own team changed their work because of him.
5. Trade-offs. The team gave up a month of feature work for the change, and he kept the old queues as a fallback for two weeks. He says what was given up, and how he limited the risk.
6. Mentoring. Two engineers on his team led the consumer changes; he paired with each on the first day and reviewed their designs. He keeps 'I' for his own decisions and names what the others did.
7. The result. Payments lost without a retry fell from about 40 a week to about 2, and the shared queue is now the default for new services. The notes hold five signals and a result with a business number.

Each sentence adds one signal, and the result carries a business number. He keeps “I” for his own decisions and names what others did, which is how influence and mentoring become evidence.

One story told at mid level and at senior level Pro: opens with a Pro, Premium or Ultimate pass

In this part:

• Stories that carry the signals, and how to choose them
• Mentoring and raising the bar, told as evidence
• Signals that make a senior story sound junior
• Practise: tag two of your stories
• Interview questions
  • What changes in a behavioural interview when you apply for a senior engineering role?
  • Tell me about a technical decision you made that other teams had to live with. How did you get them on board?
  • Tell me about someone you helped become better at their job. What did you do, and how do you know it worked?
  • Tell me about a time you argued for pausing feature work to fix an operational problem. How did you decide, and whom did you have to convince?
• Key takeaways

2 runnable examples (JavaScript) · 3 interview answers · about 29 minutes

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Terms in this lesson

career ladder

An employer's written description of what each level of a role is expected to do and how far its work reaches; also called a career framework. Some employers publish theirs.

level signal

A part of an answer that tells an interviewer what level of work it shows, such as the scope of the problem, the ambiguity you faced, your influence on others, your mentoring or a trade-off you made.

scope

The size of the work you own and decide about, from a single task to a feature, a system or several teams' systems. The levels of a career ladder differ mainly in scope and in how much direction you need.