mediumBehaviouralScenarioStaffLead
How do you take a mid-level engineer and get them to senior?
6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Define senior as a scope of autonomy and influence rather than a tenure or a skill list, agree the two or three gaps in writing, engineer assignments that produce evidence of exactly those, keep a running log of it, and say plainly what you control and what calibration does.
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Likely follow-ups
- Your organisation has no written levels. What do you do?
- How do you engineer a stretch assignment that can fail without damaging the engineer?
- The engineer is operating at senior on a team where nobody notices. How do you fix the visibility problem?
- Someone has been mid-level for five years and is not close. What is the honest conversation?
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