Senior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

Hi everyone,

I'm a senior software engineer in Brazil, and I'm interested in exploring fully remote opportunities with FAANG companies.

Does anyone have experience or insights into whether these companies hire engineers from Brazil for fully remote roles? What are the main challenges or requirements? Where can I find such job postings? Do I need a referrer? Any advice or information would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Can you share resources for data-related interviews (applied data science, data analysis, sql, big data, etc). Also, any tips that a former software engineer can best prepare for switching roles to a data engineer.

I work on a new product within a larger company. Our new product has grown to 600k ARR organically (without marketing and only a little sales) and now we’re being asked to get to 3 million ARR this year. We’re hoping to get more support from marketing and sales but I’m wondering what more on the product side can we do?

1. As an engineer, how can I break this “revenue” goal down to help figure out the team’s strategy and what we should be building?
2. Are there sub metrics I should be setting sub goals for?
3. How do I estimate how much ARR a feature will get us? (Or is that just a waste of time because they’re just educated guesses?)
4. How do I know if features on our user feedback boards will help get us new customers (and therefore more ARR) vs just making existing customers happier? Our churn has been very low so as nice as it’d be to just build what our existing users want, I want to prioritize new customers to avoid the project being shut down prematurely.

Appreciate any advice on this! This is a big unknown unknown for me so even just giving me some topics/words to research will be very helpful

Background:

Our team inherited a set of products which are full of spaghetti code and bad design. We are currently building a high visibility and high impact project based on the backend of this system.

Although the main project UI goes on-track, some critical backend design flaws will hinder product performance and reliability within a couple of months - maybe close to or right after official product launch, which will turn our whole effort into a joke since we have executives' eyes on it.

My progress this year so far: (besides my roadmap item commitment)

• 1. Identified a system hotspot, finished analysis & design, and convinced our EM to rewrite this module (currently 95% finished by a junior engineer.)
• 2. Rewrote 1 foundation module to eliminate legacy design flaw (ended up with less code, less complexity, same performance, more system reliability.)
• 3. Design and rewrite another foundation backend module to address legacy design flaw & unblock development of the next milestone
• 4. Leading on technical design and discussion of a re-architecture for the overall backend end to end flow. (simplify design, improve performance)

NOTE:
- I tried to delegate 2 & 3, but no other engineers can do them after a few try since it's too tightly coupled with the rest of the system.
- our team lead is championing for all these work, which is how we are able to make room for them

Benefit of these work:

• accelerate other engineers' work in the system
• cut clean with the legacy system design flaw, improve product reliability and performance
• ensure our team's win on the high visibility project that built on top of this backend
• easier oncall for the short run or long run

My questions:

• In terms of performance review, my manager thinks this is better engineering work, while I think is closely tied to the success of our main project. What kind of evidence do I need to convince him? (My EM is not very technical)
• From his tone, I sense he thinks better engineering work in considered "lower priority contribution". Is this true? How do I communicate the importance of code/design quality with him?
• I'm trying to reach the staff level promo, does this initiative demonstrate any trait for the next level? (I'm not doing it for promo, but my EM's neglect on this makes me pretty frustrated because refactoring and rewrite is such tedious and painful work... I want to make it count)

Thank you!

Hello folks,
I have an upcoming Staff ML Eng. interview with Meta. Could someone please suggest some good resources for behavioral preparation? I have finished the join taro course.

I've been an active user of ChatGPT, and it's been a huge help for coding, writing documents, emails, and Jira stories. Unfortunately, I can't use Copilot in my organization yet, as the legal team is still discussing the potential risks.

I'm eager to take things to the next level and initiate projects that can make a real impact on my business unit teams. So, I'm currently exploring ways to utilize Gen AI to enhance the cost-effectiveness of processes and tooling across my business unit.

I'm curious to learn from others about their internal initiatives using Gen AI that have had a significant impact in your organisation. Any insights or examples from your team would be greatly appreciated!

I have gone through a post in Slack about paper reading and its benefits.

As an Android developer, I did not find paper reading will be useful in my day to day job. Because the system design for a frontend Android is different.

I have this doubt from long time: How can i improve my design skills in Android? I see many people in our org come up with a good doubts and points in architecture discussions, but I am not able to do that. Could you please help me with what I can do to improve these design skills? I believe I should constantly do something to master this, but I am not sure what to do.

One way is I can learn it by doing - I am learning from my current project but that is not so scalable. I want to multiply my learning curve here.

Thank you in advance.

Hi my friend’s abilities exceed his years of experience. He passed the interview criteria for a senior level at Microsoft but they’re trying to lowball his salary based on years experience / their arbitrary choices.

They elected to interview him anyway in spite of that so it seems like they’re just flexing their leverage after-the-fact since he’s H1B. What can he do to negotiate? He shouldn’t have to accept a pay cut… I know people from more brand name schools and companies who got treated better and just appropriately compensated by MSFT…

I've been put on a 4-week improvement plan with tight deadlines, but the goals seem achievable if I work extra hours. While my manager appears supportive, I don't fully trust his intentions.

On the other hand, I have another job lined up, which I'm excited about, and it offers a higher compensation. They want me to join early but they are open to waiting the month for me to start.

Do you suggest I wait to be laid off and receive severance (which I estimate would be about 12 weeks' pay), or is there an advantage to leaving the company before the improvement plan finishes?

No kids, no debts, and enough savings to support me for 5 years.

I'm a new MLE at Meta, so I'm in bootcamp. I'm trying to go for a team that’s super in-depth with regards to ML and neural architectures vs. a team that would give me more breadth. How can I find such a team and what questions can I ask to identify it?

Hi,

I often hear from here that you should strive to land code as fast as possible to make a meaningful impact and get feedback from your users. I follow this mantra pretty closely as I see those story points as free baskets that make my team look good (because objectively, we're getting stuff done), but it seems many engineers don't subscribe to this philosophy. Sometimes, I see PRs that have been QA'd and approved linger around for days to weeks... It feels like a problem, but it also feels like I'm the only one who brings it up. What is the best course of action?

I am actively interviewing for companies and passed hiring committee for Google but there are barely any headcount. I have received some good competing offers and I told my recruiter I have some deadlines coming up. That has not sped up the process and my recruiter isn’t especially communicative after I told him I wouldn’t mind expanding the product area for team match. Should I just accept a good competing offer and come back to team match while working that other job? Also, does anyone have experience finding a new recruiter at this stage? I don’t feel like mine is particularly invested in advocating for my profile despite passing hiring committee.

I am considering a role at Stripe. The stock offer looks great, but I'm worried that they might IPO and the stock might drop rapidly.

Is the main solution just to quit immediately after IPO time? Is there something better I could do to de-risk myself financially?

My manager gave his 2 week notice today for personal reasons. The company is working on backfilling his role which in the meantime will be handled by his manager. I recently started this job a few months ago, so while I have worked closely with my manager, I haven't yet worked with his manager or other managers in the org yet.

Here are my questions around making this transition smooth:

• What can I do in the next 2 weeks to ensure that the work I've done with my manager is captured well for other people in the org to notice?
• How do I best approach the last one-on-one with my manager?
• And how can I make a good impression with my new interim manager?

What strategies can I employ to excel in my new role as a senior software engineer at a tier 1 tech company, coming as a mid level engineer.

I've shared feedback before with engineers more junior than me, and they didn't seem to take it well. They started avoiding our meetings afterwards - I feel like they thought their PSC was at risk. How can I prevent this situation from happening in the future when sharing feedback with E3s/E4s?

As an E5, I will have 1:1 meetings with E4s on the team to lead/mentor them. However, I find myself running out of time in the meetings sometimes - What can I do to make effective use of all the time?

My first order priority is to ship great projects and have a strong narrative behind them, one that can help in future interviews when switching companies. Does it make sense to also pursue promotion (a move to Staff in my case) as a core goal? I know that this promotion can take a while, and I've been told Etsy falls under this bucket as well.

How to navigate working with new engineering manager who is away for 1st month?

From my first one-on-one with my new direct manager (M3), my new manager tell me that he will be away 1st month to travel to Asia for family visit. My new manager told me that he would only be avaliable during India timezone so he will not have any one-on-one with me due to time zone difference. So he asks me to work directly with the Director (M4) for this month. I have worked with this director for 8-12 months last year, who are my current Director (M4). Wanted to see if anyone has any thought on how to navigate through the next month while my direct manager is gone and won't be avaliable for me.

My direct manager reassures me that I will still have one-on-one with my skip on a weekly basis, and nothing should have changed since I worked with my Director (M4) before as I was his direct report as Senior Software Engineer.

Wanted to ask if there's anything that I should consider for this 1 month of transition with my new engineering manager?

Over the past year, we've focused on developing our product quickly, which has led to a significant amount of technical debt in our codebase. As a result, we've shipped applications without proper architecture and planning. However, when I suggest refactoring or re-architecting to my team, many of the senior developers and the engineering manager are skeptical. In my opinion, I am not just offering refactoring for just sake of refactoring; it's necessary because our current code base lacks abstraction and separation of concerns and has slow development times.

Examples:

• Adding a new column to the database takes 1-2 days
• Or changing some code breaks another part of the application(lack of separation of concerns and abstraction)
• Another example, recently I introduced integration tests to our team because we manually tested a lot of stuff on staging before deployment, in that case, my EM's argument was integration tests are very slow to run on every build.

In those examples, how can I reduce skepticism in my team and bring more productivity, and more good code quality, and best practices to my team?

Right now, I have to write a growth plan to grow from mid level to senior engineer in my company. For doing this, me and my lead have decided to write down a growth plan for me.

While searching for effective techniques, I found SMART framework and also how to set your goals. But I'm wondering if we have a growth plan expert here? And what framework/template/steps do they follow?

This question relates to (an excellent session by the way which really inspired me!). It made a lot of sense to pick something super simple and do it. However, what do you do once you've implemented your simple idea? Specifically in terms of tracking and marketing:

1. Tracking: I've heard Alex/Rahul mention the number of users is important (moreso than monetizing etc). Maybe Android/iOS apps have in built tracking (I'm not sure), but I'm doing a web app - do you recommend proactively integrating tracking tools to ensure you can show how many users you have if asked about it? Any specific ones? Esp since having logins and account maintenance adds complexity and wanted to keep my app simple.
2. Marketing: How did you get to 100,000 installs? Was it just early days and the app stores were less saturated? Did you do any marketing or did people just happen to search your app? I can't imagine that many people just stumbling onto my website!

Hello!

I used to work for a large fin tech company but recently got a job at a client-based company. They flew me into the office for an onboarding week and the culture and people are fantastic. I even made a decision to move from DC into the Houston office just cause of the people and weirdly I realized that my personality is a bigger asset than I realized. I enjoy chatting with people, and a Director of Product even told me "I don't usually hold 1:1s with the new folks but your personality was shining so bright!"

I only give this info cause I'm not very confident in my technical skills. While I got a great performance review in my last company, it was because of my determination, my willingness to go full stack when no one wanted to, and cause I was very close with the Product and Design team. Tbh that's also cause I don't really nerd out about state management or the newest framework or whatever like everyone else seems to. I enjoy frontend cause I like making pretty things and that's it. I'm not the person who is constantly thinking about how to make our testing process or pipelines better. I can learn those things if I need to but it doesn't come naturally to me.

I have admitted some of this to folks at my new company and they've been super cool about it. They even suggested I dabble into a Technical PM role. That's still something I'm chewing on cause while it's silly, I love typing things on my pretty little IDE and I like fewer meetings. But I don't imagine coding forever. In my company, a senior engineer gets to lead a project, manage people, and talk to clients. I'm aiming for a senior role cause I think it aligns more with my natural skill sets as I believe my soft skills are stronger than my technical skills.

My manager became a senior recently and told me it was because he was willing to do whatever client project came in whatever language that was required. He's the same age as me and only started coding 3 years ago after a BootCamp. This is his only company but I'll admit, I feel like he's a stronger engineer than I am. I've been in the company for a few weeks, and I've been getting my stories done quickly even though their tech stack is new (but everyone is fast) but I'm not sure how to even become a Senior since I don't know if I will be able to become the rockstar engineer that my manager is. I will move earliest in September so I'm remote until then. Projects also come and go so fast. Any ideas on how to standout?

Context

I have secured a job offer as a Tech Lead at Zepto - a series F startup based out of India.

The company is operating in quick commerce space which is like e-commerce in 10 minutes using Demand Prediction and Dark Stores in a certain region.

Career Aspirations

I have aspirations for career growth as an IC and the HR were rolling out offer for Staff as well, but stuck with Lead Software Engineer for now, so as to establish myself better first and then move towards staff role.

The Hiring Manager mentioned that it is possible to quickly progress to staff role in 4-5 months, which is a pure IC based role while Lead Software Engineer involved some level of team task prioritisation/planning etc. also

I had been trying to move ahead to Lead Software Engineer position in my previous company for a lot of years and did not get enough support.

Thus, I am really grateful to this offer and just want to give my best.

Would love any hear your thoughts on how to succeed as a Tech Lead.

Introductory call with CTO

With the context setup, The introductory calls are being scheduled now each coming week.

The first call being with the Company CTO.

I want to be able to have good learning and career growth at the company.

What are some of the questions I can ask as a to be Tech Lead at Zepto so as to make the best use of my call with him?

I was thinking about the following:

• What are some of the focus areas for us at Zepto in 2024?
• Does this translate to some high level focus areas for engineering teams? - such as building abstractions or a platform using which we can enable business better?
• Are there some technical hindrances that are being faced to achieve the focus areas for the business? or What could be some reasons to not be able to achieve above focus areas? And how are we planning to preempt them?
• Are there some areas of improvement you are seeing from an operational perspective in Tech & Product teams? Are we doing anything towards that?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. And hear more about the things I can discuss in the call.

My goal is to succeed as a Tech Lead for my team at Zepto, contribute as much as I can in terms of impact and learn from the experience.

References in comments due to character limit