You execute on well-defined problems, delivering quality work with growing independence. You're building your craft, learning systems, and embodying Caldera's engineering principles.
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Time Horizon: You focus on 1-2 week tasks and features, breaking down work into achievable pieces and delivering them consistently.
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Ownership: You own execution and delivery. Early on, you're given both a problem and a solution to implement. As you grow, you're given a problem and direction, then figure out how to deliver it.
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Impact: Your scope of impact is on individual tasks or features within a project. You complete well-defined pieces of work that contribute to larger efforts.
Building excellent software through technical skill, judgment, and continuous learning.
- Write clean, tested code following team standards
- Learn patterns from the codebase and apply them
- Debug systematically and ask clarifying questions to deepen your understanding
- Seek feedback and incorporate it into your work
- Grow your skills deliberately and share learnings with the team
- Document solutions to problems that others might encounter
- Leverage tools (AI or otherwise) that help you deliver quality work faster
Taking ownership, delivering outcomes, and creating value for clients and Caldera.
- Complete assigned tasks with growing independence
- Follow through on commitments and meet deadlines
- Communicate blockers and challenges early, before they delay delivery
- Provide regular progress updates without being asked
- Clarify requirements when something is ambiguous rather than making assumptions
- Deliver features that work as specified
- Understand how your work serves client needs
Growing others, building shared understanding, and multiplying effectiveness.
- Learn from feedback and coaching
- Offer to help teammates when you have relevant knowledge
- Share resources or approaches that helped you solve similar problems
- Participate actively in code reviews
- Ask questions that help the team
- Contribute positively to team culture through your communications
You're operating at this level when people see you doing these things:
- Posting pull requests with clear descriptions, tests, and implementation that follows team patterns
- Asking clarifying questions in Slack/tickets when requirements are unclear, before implementing
- Sharing daily progress updates that show consistent delivery on 1-2 week tasks
- Commenting thoughtfully on others' PRs with questions about edge cases or code quality
- Documenting your debugging process when you hit blockers, showing systematic troubleshooting
- Sharing which tools or approaches helped you deliver work faster while maintaining quality
In a remote organization, your work must be visible to be valued. These are the observable signals that you're delivering at this level.
You consistently demonstrate these behaviors over 6+ months:
- Completing features independently (not just tasks)
- Proposing solutions, not just implementing them
- Anticipating problems before they become blockers
- Planning 1-3 months ahead, not just 1-2 weeks
- Helping unblock teammates proactively
- Influencing team practices through your contributions
Note: Most engineers reach Senior level with 2-4 years of experience.