I was pretty baffled when I first learnt about Netflix’s philosophy of hiring exclusively senior software engineers. What? No room for my beloved new grads or mid level engineers? How very square of them!**
I recently left my job as an engineering manager at Lyft. As I’m mulling over my last 2 years in engineering leadership, I’ve come to obsess over what I call the “inverted triangle” team composition problem in tech. One of the challenges that engineering managers face is building a team composed of engineers at the right level of seniority. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! Before we dive into team composition, let’s talk about the seniority bands in tech companies.
Roughly speaking, seniority in engineering spans across 4 bands. We have the mighty staff engineers (SE) who are experts in the fields and are responsible for setting the technical vision and overseeing multiple projects on the team. Then we have senior engineers (SR) who will typically lead a large, complex project and are expected to be able to run the day to day operations of the team (if summoned to do so). Mid level Engineers (M) have typically been in the industry for 2–5 years and work on sub-features of projects. For e.g. a senior engineer responsible for building the purchase flow for Crypotokittens may break up the project into several features (and example of a feature may be to fetch the available token…