You operate at the product and company level. You discover problems worth solving, define multi-month initiatives, and create transformational impact. You shape Caldera's technical strategy, build organizational capabilities, and influence the broader engineering community.
-
Time Horizon: You focus on 6-12 month products and company-level initiatives, shaping strategic direction and building capabilities that serve the organization long-term.
-
Ownership: You own problem discovery across all areas. You identify the most important problems worth solving, plus everything below—discovering solutions, owning delivery, and executing when needed.
-
Impact: Your scope of impact extends from products to company-level initiatives. Your work influences multiple products, sets technical direction, and shapes company strategy.
Building excellent software through technical skill, judgment, and continuous learning.
- Design platforms and systems that create lasting leverage
- Make strategic technology choices with company-wide impact
- Demonstrate expertise across multiple domains
- Bring cutting-edge insights and transformative technologies to the company before they're mainstream
- Champion technologies and practices that position Caldera for multi-year success
- Define technical standards and best practices that balance speed with quality
- Shape Caldera's technical direction over multi-month horizons
Taking ownership, delivering outcomes, and creating value for clients and Caldera.
- Discover and define company-level problems worth solving
- Identify strategic opportunities that shape Caldera's technical direction
- Own multi-month initiatives that deliver transformational outcomes
- Take responsibility for organizational technical health
- Partner with clients on transformational initiatives
- Understand clients' business at strategic level
- Shape how the company approaches technology and value delivery
- Drive adoption of force-multiplier technologies and practices across the organization
Growing others, building shared understanding, and multiplying effectiveness.
- Multiply effectiveness of entire engineering organization
- Develop engineering leaders who can operate at Principal and Distinguished levels
- Influence how the company approaches technology
- Build organizational capabilities that scale across the entire company
- Influence executives, clients, and engineers effectively
- Shape engineering culture at company level
- Influence the broader engineering community through external contributions
You're operating at this level when people see you doing these things:
- Publishing company-wide technical strategy documents that executive leadership references when making business decisions
- Speaking at all-hands meetings about multi-quarter initiatives that are transforming company capabilities
- Visibly participating in C-suite and board discussions where your technical perspective shapes company direction
- Creating and evangelizing platforms or standards that you can see being adopted across every engineering team
- Mentoring Principal Engineers publicly through complex technical and strategic decisions that influence company outcomes
- Driving company-wide adoption of transformative practices (like AI-augmented development workflows) that demonstrably improve delivery speed and 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.
Critical Understanding: Both roles execute, deliver, and discover solutions. Distinguished adds consistent problem discovery and company-level strategic ownership.
Ownership
- Principal: Solution Discovery → Problem Discovery (beginning to identify problems)
- Distinguished: Problem Discovery (+ all below) — consistently find problems worth solving
Time & Impact
- Principal: 3-6 months, Projects → Products
- Distinguished: 6-12 months, Products → Company
Leadership
- Principal: Leading teams through technical excellence
- Distinguished: Shaping organizational capabilities and strategy
A Distinguished Engineer still writes code, delivers features, and solves technical problems—they do everything a Principal does PLUS shape what problems the company solves.