Breaking through the Senior Engineer ceiling

You’ve made it to Senior engineer. Now what? You’re now staring at the next level, Staff typically, sometimes Principal, or whatever your company calls it. The path feels murky. Your manager gives you feedback like “show more technical leadership” or “think bigger picture”, but what does that actually mean day-to-day?

I’ve been there. I’ve also been on the other side, helping engineers grow through whatever explicit (or implicit) levels a company has.

In this post, I won’t try to come up with another levelling framework or list of responsibilities. Levelling frameworks have their uses but at an early stage startup they don’t drive engineers’ growth in effective ways.

Growth is more nuanced than ticking off tasks on a list or completing that one complex project. I know it’s frustrating to hear “just spend more time on X” or “just wait a bit” without clear direction on what drives that growth. So instead of leaving you with vague advice, I want to use this post to talk about what you should actually spend your time thinking about to get there and how you recognise whether you’re actually developing the right skills (or just think you are).

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to use Senior+ to mean “beyond Senior”.

The way I personally like to think about this is that folks operating at Senior+ levels, must have a combination of experience, expertise and wisdom. (I’m pretty sure this clicked for me when I read this post by Adam Grant).

Experience, Expertise, and Wisdom - the trifecta

Experience isn’t just about how many years you’ve been on the job; it’s about navigating various challenges, facing complex technical problems, and learning from them.

Expertise emerges when experience is paired with what’s called deliberate practice (check Anders Ericsson on this topic). Building expertise requires actively seeking mastery, analysing problems, and reshaping your skills.

Wisdom is the final piece. I see this as the ability to know when to “be right” and when to “get the job done”. From my experience, it seems to be a combination of personality traits, a deep understanding of your own expertise, and an intuition for people’s motivations.

You typically see these three build progressively: experience comes first, which allows expertise to develop, and then wisdom to top it all off.

How the trifecta shows up in practice

So, how do you use these, I hear you ask? With the right experience, expertise, and wisdom, Senior+ engineers become the bar keepers and bar raisers. They don’t merely solve technical problems, they lead the organisation by thinking long-term, and steering projects and decisions that benefit the company’s overall future.

But what does this actually look like day-to-day? If you want to operate at Senior+ levels, you need to exhibit certain characteristics that manifest the trifecta in practice.

Let me discuss a few of the concrete ways experience, expertise, and wisdom show up in your work.

Technical leadership

You need to have the experience, expertise and be wise enough to think bigger and wider. You should guide people towards the right technical approach for the current needs, whilst keeping tabs on how things will probably evolve and end up in half-year or a year’s time.

This isn’t just about completing a complex project. It’s about making well-founded bets on behalf of your team, an entire function, or even the company.

This isn’t a “has done a complex project” kind of technical leadership, or has speeded up CI. This is a “we get this wrong and we’ll burn millions of dollars in opportunity cost and we will end up in a hole bigger than when we first started”.

One final aspect is that you need to be ahead: you typically don’t need someone to guide you towards where the high impact problems are, you identify high impact problems and make them obvious to the rest of the organisation.

Multipliers

This one is well discussed and written up online. As a Senior+ engineer, you don’t just excel individually, you amplify the abilities of those around you. You teach, mentor, and set the standards other people want to follow. You propagate any skill you have.

You inspire and motivate. You can, will, and want to do roles that have multiplier effects, and people naturally gravitate to you.

You are a multiplier even when you venture outside of your areas of expertise. For example, if you’re working with Sales, you are able to have a narrative that a Sales person can add to their belt for their next sales call.

Another example, and surely one familiar to engineering leaders hiring: when a hiring wave starts, engineers tend to struggle with interview volume, quality of interviews, etc. As a senior ~~engineer~~ leader you understand the business need, work to improve the efficacy of the hiring process, and help managers make it a success.

You are a multiplier in every room you’re in.

Great communicators

Clear communication is essential if you want to operate at Senior+ levels. Whether you’re influencing, mentoring or resolving conflicts.

You need to adapt your message to diverse audiences - from talking to customers, presenting and speaking publicly, to delivering key feedback, or managing a crisis, your communication must be clear and easily understandable.

At incident.io, communication is key to everything we do as a company and therefore you need to master this. This isn’t to say you have to always do it perfectly, but you can adapt, review, know where you’re weakest and continuously work at it.

Grace under pressure

This one is easily misunderstood so I’ll do my best to explain what I mean by this.

As a Senior+ engineer, you need to manage your emotions effectively. This isn’t to say you don’t get upset or frustrated (we all do). It’s about consistently making sound decisions when the pressure is on, and when you do slip up, recognising it quickly and course-correcting.

Where this shows up in product development:

making decisions under pressure (be that a tight deadline, or a critical system failure)
resolving conflicts - whether you like it or not, you will operate with different stakeholders, and with different personalities and needs.
difficult or controversial trade-offs conversations

No company is immune to moments where decisions need to be made under pressure or conflict arises as different stakeholders bring their different needs (not even incident.io).

The way I like to think about this is by asking “Who would we trust to make the right decision at the right time that we could (mostly) blindly back in a critical incident?”

That should immediately tell you something about your potential ability to operate as a Senior+ engineer.

Company > Function > Team > Individual

I love to think that any engineer of any level can have this mindset but their roles and places in an organisation often tend to get in the way. Not for you as a Senior+. You operate this way, with that order of prioritisation.

But here’s the thing - it’s easy to say “yeah, I put the company first” until you’re in the thick of it. Let me give you some scenarios to test yourself:

When your team is swamped but another team is blocking a company-critical launch, do you volunteer your team’s time to help unblock them, even if it means your own sprint goals suffer?
When you discover a security vulnerability that requires immediate attention, do you drop everything to work on it, even if it means having to do a bunch of stakeholder management work on the rest of the deliverables?
When the company decided to sunset a feature your team built, are you the one helping people understand why it is the right call, or are you quietly hoping someone else fights the decision?

These aren’t abstract examples. They happen, I’ve seen every single one of those first-hand, and how you respond reveals whether you truly operate with this prioritisation or just think you do.

Your decisions are impactful at the company level first. You think about the success of the company, the needs of the engineering function, any team dynamics, and the motivations of individuals. And guess what, as a great senior+ engineer you make decisions that correctly prioritise across this stack.

Getting this right most of the time is hard and, I should add, difficult to train. It requires the trifecta (experience, expertise and wisdom) to be at a very high bar.

Positivity and grit

Most people tend to think of these as just personality traits. But they are more than that, they can be nurtured through practice.

Positivity brings the best in people. Cynicism on the other hand is a culture killer. Positivity counters cynicism. Now, this isn’t just naive optimism. It’s grounded in experience and wisdom, and helps people overcome problems.

Grit is a non-negotiable to persevere in the face of challenges or resource constraints. Instead of simply taking constraints and problems and talk about all the reasons why something hadn't or couldn't work, as a senior+ engineer you find your core focus, align it to the organisational goals, and find a way. You are resilient.

With these qualities, you don't wait to be told what the problem is. You identify the problem, make and communicate a plan, and take initiative to chase a solution. And you do it while bringing the right people along for the ride.

Example setting

In very concrete terms, the vast majority of what you do has to be exemplar. If you fail on something, you become the example of how to recover from it. If you fail multiple times (careful, Senior+ engineers should be right a lot) you get up and keep going - you are the example.

When someone is down, needs help, doesn’t have the priorities right, as a Senior+ engineer will assist or find assistance (e.g: flag with an engineering manager).

When leading incidents, when supporting someone leading incidents, you are the example for everyone working with you.

When the company, a team, or an individual is going through a crisis, as a senior+ engineer you are the lighthouse.

You are the solid foundation of what we want all engineers to aspire to be.

Ability to navigate without a map

You don’t need a map. You push and drive yourself, you’re able to see through the fog, you persevere, you recover from failure, etc. You chart your own path within an organisation.

Managers have the responsibility to guide and enable people, but they should also expect you as a Senior+ engineer to chart your own path through ambiguity.

Final thoughts

Being a Senior+ engineer is demanding and very impactful. You not only shape your own career but also drive the success of the organisation and the teams you work with.

I believe that by embodying the above characteristics, you create the conditions for excellence, and inspire everyone around you to adjust their standards to a higher bar.