Getting intimated when i plan to do design readouts

If your technical design is rock-solid, and you have inputs from senior/staff engineers on it vouching for its quality, I wouldn't worry. It would be mean for leadership to punch down on a mid-level engineer, especially if it's their first presentation.

My advice is that similar to a behavioral interview or resume, you want to make things as simple as possible. Some engineering executives haven't coded in 15+ years and are effectively non-technical. Use "plain English" as much as you can, and slide decks/visuals tend to resonate more with leadership than big design docs.

If you want to feel really safe, you can have a senior/staff engineer mentor from your team also in the meeting ready to bail you out if you get a question that you can't handle.

Here are a few tactical tips to make sure your API design is bulletproof:

• Make sure you cover alternative approaches, tradeoffs, and why you ultimately decided on your design
• Request comments from people on your team and other teams, preferably more senior engineers
• If there are any unresolved comments or a lot of back and forth, I would try to resolve these issues in a meeting to make sure you get that sign off.

There is a point where you should feel like you've exhausted every little edge case and answered every comment. At that point, you'll only get diminishing returns, and it's not worth it to spend more time on your design. You've done everything you can at this point.

I would recommend treating the readout like a workshop where leadership isn't judging you, but they are trying to get clarification. They usually want to make sure that other teams are aware of the work, other teams agree to the work, other teams know how the work will impact their own timelines, and that the timelines are reasonable. You can try to put yourself into their shoes to proactively answer any questions that may be asked.

I would try to reframe your perspective about looking dumb or whether people will look down on you. I would try to see this as an experience where you are all working together to make sure everything is buttoned up as much as possible so the execution will be as clean as possible, which will minimize any roadblocks from happening in the future. Hopefully, leadership is trying to help you, and they want you to succeed because when you succeed, they succeed, too, and you all win.