What makes you a Senior Engineer?

What makes a Senior Engineer? Years of experience? Technical seniority? Perhaps there is more to it.

Accountability

How do you handle project scoping, delivery deadlines, and working to completion?

In addition to being able to cut through ambiguity to deliver results, senior engineers are expected to be accountable to others and themselves. They are responsible for project timelines and ensuring that the features shipped to production meet all of the project’s requirements.

Time Management

Managing time effectively is one of the common traits among senior software engineers, and it is also one of the hardest skills.

As you write more code and build up more domain knowledge, you’ll start to become an integral part of your team. You’ll become the expert on certain features and areas of the codebase, and people will come to you with questions about how something works or if it is possible to extend something you wrote with new functionality. You’ll spend more time tracking down bugs, planning new projects, building out feature specifications, and possibly even helping to interview candidates to join your team.

Time management gets harder the more senior you get. Your team will become increasingly reliant on you to keep things moving, so it is important to get things done while not wasting your time.

Attention to Detail

A senior engineer will spend time sweating the small stuff (when it matters). Some examples: They have an ability to find gaps in the requirements and ask the right questions to fill those gaps. They tend to be diligent about keeping their code clean and organized. They read other people’s code, sometimes more than once, to understand what it is doing. Then, they try to figure out ways in which it can fail. They are meticulous about covering all the bases, whether it is through test coverage, input validation, or handling edge cases. The more scenarios their code handles, the less chance it has to fail. They know how important good documentation can be and will find time to write it, even if it is not the most glamorous part of the job.

Ambiguity

How do you take action to solve difficult problems?

Senior engineers are often asked to solve difficult technical problems when there isn’t always a good understanding about how to get there. It is up to the senior engineer to break the problem down into smaller, more manageable pieces, determine dependencies between the pieces, and put together a plan for building a solution. Junior engineers, on the other hand, often have a known path set out in front of them and are tasked with working towards a goal.

Team-first Approach

A senior engineer recognizes the importance of the team, and they identify and complete tasks that benefit the team, even if the work isn’t planned or assigned to them. They understand that sometimes being senior means taking on the mundane tasks that no one else wants to do, because it will help unblock others to complete more work.

Senior engineers look for opportunities to mentor junior engineers, help them develop their coding skills, and teach them problem-solving techniques.

Senior engineers understand that in some cases, sacrificing their own productivity in order to unblock or enable other developers’ productivity is time well spent. They may spend a day without coding while they work through requirements for a project because they know it will enable the rest of their team to work quickly with clear instructions. They view productivity in terms of the whole team, rather than just themselves, and sometimes that means working through others or spending more time upfront in order to enable their team members to move faster in the future.