L3: New Grad/Entry

You’re learning the stack, shipping with guidance, and building reliability.

• scope: features or well-shaped tasks.
• autonomy: needs direction; blocks are expected and surfaced early.
• ambiguity: low; work decomposed by others.
• influence: your lane; your PRs.

What great looks like: fast learner, clean diffs, great questions, reliable oncall checklists, thoughtful tests, eager to own small areas.

L4: Mid-Level Engineer

You deliver end-to-end within a team, and you reduce load on seniors.

• scope: a component or small service.
• autonomy: takes loosely defined tasks to done.
• ambiguity: moderate; clarifies requirements with PM/Design.
• influence: within your squad; mentors L3s informally.

Great L4s turn product ideas into technical plans, write solid RFCs, and quietly keep the backlog honest.

L5: Senior Engineer

You are the team’s force multiplier.

• scope: critical services or features that touch multiple components.
• autonomy: from problem → solution with limited oversight.
• ambiguity: high; you turn fuzzy goals into concrete plans.
• influence: across the team and adjacent teams; durable mentorship.

Signs of L5: sets SLOs, leads incident reviews, designs for 2–3-year horizons, prioritizes the boring but important fixes, and teaches others to do the same.

L7: Principal and Beyond

You shape the technical identity of an organization.

• scope: company-level pillars, multiproduct platforms, or existential risks.
• autonomy: sets roadmaps others execute.
• ambiguity: extreme; defines categories, not just solutions.
• influence: org-wide or company-wide; external reputation often included.

At L7+, you’re editing the architecture of the org as much as the architecture of the code.

Negotiating Level

Your biggest post-offer lever may be the level itself. Tactically:

• Ask: “Was leveling borderline? What specific gaps were noted?” This invites a soft reconsideration.
• Share evidence: prior scope, systems owned, cross-team leadership. Match to their rubric language.
• Negotiate for a level review checkpoint (e.g., 4–6 months) with written expectations if the level won’t change now.
• Consider team placement: the same level can feel very different across teams based on roadmap and resourcing.

If they won’t budge, negotiate scope: projects, charter, mentorship expectations—then tie comp refreshers to those.

Startup vs BigCo

• Startups:
  • Pros: faster scope growth, less process, broader surface area.
  • Cons: fuzzy levels, title inflation, limited calibration, comp volatility.
• BigCo:
  • Pros: clear rubrics, reliable calibration, mature mentorship, stable comp.
  • Cons: more process, narrower ownership, slower change.

If the ladder is vague, ask for the career ladder doc, promo frequency, and the last three successful promos at your target level: what work, how long, what evidence.

Red Flags

• Senior with no rubric: title inflation risk.
• “You’ll lead, but no time for design docs.” Translation: chaos is the process.
• “Promotion is headcount-dependent.” Healthy orgs separate performance from vacancies.
• “Tech Lead” as a title without level change. TL is a role, not a level—clarify expectations and comp.

Gut check: if the story of your success depends on heroics, not systems, reconsider.

First 90 Days

Tailor your ramp to level:

• L3–L4: ship small wins weekly; learn the pager; build trust with crisp execution and good questions.
• L5: deliver a meaty feature end-to-end; improve a critical oncall runbook; mentor intentionally.
• L6: land a cross-team design; retire a class of incidents; establish a standard (linting, tracing, SLOs) org-wide.
• L7: align leaders on a technical strategy; sequence a multi-quarter migration; create leverage with a platform or program.

Across all levels: write it down. Clear RFCs are portable proof.

EM Track Overview

What changes if you go EM?

• Time shifts from code to outcomes, people, and portfolio health.
• Core loops: hiring, performance, coaching, delivery, and technical stewardship (often via your Staff partners).
• Great EMs create an environment where great ICs thrive: clear OKRs, sane oncall, predictable execution, and space for deep work.

If you love unblocking humans and designing systems-of-systems, you’ll likely enjoy EM.

Switching Tracks

The pendulum move (IC ↔ EM) is common.

• Try before you buy: take on TL responsibilities as an IC or adopt a project EM hat temporarily.
• Keep your narrative coherent: “I optimize for leverage. Right now, that’s IC/EM because…”
• If switching back to IC, bring people systems with you: delegation, feedback, prioritization—these are senior IC superpowers.

Request a level calibration when switching. Don’t assume a one-to-one mapping.

Level Up Strategy

How to make the next level obvious:

• Write your staff-like impact now: choose work that multiplies others, not just yourself.
• Manage ambiguity: proactively shape problems, don’t wait for tickets.
• Quantify outcomes: latency, reliability, revenue, developer velocity. Pick two and move them.
• Build a coalition: mentor 2–3 engineers, partner with PM/EM/Design, seek a sponsor at your target level.
• Package the story: maintain a living promo packet—executive summary, outcomes, artifacts, testimonials.

Quiet, repeated excellence beats one loud launch.

Recap

• Level is the operating system of your job: scope, autonomy, ambiguity, influence.
• IC and EM are parallel tracks; choose your energy source.
• Rough map: L3 (entry), L4 (mid), L5 (senior), L6 (staff), L7 (principal+).
• Post-offer, negotiate level and scope first; comp follows.
• Use rubrics, evidence, and artifacts to calibrate across companies.
• Optimize for environments where your next level is a predictable consequence of the work you’re already doing.

Pick the level that lets you do the best work of your life—and puts you in rooms where that work gets multiplied.