Expectations at different levels? (Junior vs Mid)

I really want to include canonical examples of the scope/ownership expectations for each engineering level in Taro!

In the meantime, one really simple heuristic: how far in advance do you know what you'll work on? If you're SDE1, you're probably handed bugs/small features to work on for a few days at a time.

With SDE2, I'd expect you to tackle more ambiguous projects which may take 2-3 weeks. You should of course be checking in during that time (and providing status updates), but you have a clear objective/autonomy on a multi-week time window.

Levels are interchangeable among FAANG/FAANG-equivalent companies generally, so I do imagine that SDE 2 isn't too different from Meta E4. For a very detailed breakdown of Meta E4 expectations, I recommend checking out my Meta E4 -> E5 growth plan.

I also recommend checking out this Q&A around what a competent mid-level engineer looks like. There, I break down how a mid-level engineer's performance is mainly dictated by very high technical proficiency and what that concretely looks like.

That aside, I actually disagree with Rahul in his time horizon for mid-level engineer projects: A task that takes 2-3 weeks of coding is something I would expect an SDE 1 to be decent at. I believe that a meaty SDE 2 task should take 2-3 months.

The most concrete thing you can do is benchmark yourself against strong SDE 2s in your team/org (you can ask your manager for who are good role models). Some things to observe from them:

1. Their code velocity and quality
2. Their code review volume and quality
3. How they conduct themselves in meetings
4. The amount of ownership and communication they exert on projects
5. How they handle fixing bugs and production events

Thank you for the details response guys. This helps. To answer Rahul's question, I did ask my manager in my intro 1:1 if you have anything planned for me or first project or anything that I will be working on and he mentioned that he has nothing such planned upfront for me at the moment. I guess it'll be decided once I join the team.

I agree with Alex's and Rahul's answer and I'd like to share my experience when I started at Amazon as a SDE1 engineer. I was a replacement for a senior engineer and was made to work on a project that he left halfway through. Although I had the design of the project and half of the implementation was already done, I still had to spend lot of time debugging and learning new concepts to understand the project on my own. When I asked my mentor about how feasible it is to work on projects which aren't appropriate for a level you are hired for I was said that if I want to progress to the next level in my career I'd need to demonstrate that I could do the work of the subsequent level for at least six months without much assistance. I'm sure scenarios like these are uncommon but for most companies the expectations are what Alex and Rahul mentioned in their comment.

For advice on how to hit the ground running:

• This Q&A has become a great go-to resource on the basics of onboarding. It's from a Google engineer, so it should pretty much entirely apply as another FAANG company.
• On top of racking up small wins as mentioned in the above Q&A, make your code quality as high as possible. With an SDE 1, I just expect functional code, but the bar is higher for an SDE 2. In terms of how to make the code high-quality, it's largely covered in the 1st half of our code review session.
• Since you're SDE 2, I recommend reviewing code from SDE 1s and interns if you can. SDE 2 is the level where I expect them to be able to help other engineers, mainly those at earlier levels like the ones I mentioned. The E4s that really impressed me at Meta after joining were generally able to hit the ground running on code review as well. This is a core difference from SDE 1.