Am I ready to be a Senior Engineer?
summary
Clear checklist for the jump: a senior builds big things and tolerates ambiguity, leads discovery->MVP->growth->maintenance, and uses a simple three decision questions (company-only / industry / common problem) to choose buy vs build. Practical tools include LLMs to draft memos, MVP metrics as hypotheses (test ROI and user behavior), system design tradeoffs (S3, queues, tracing), on‑call triage that prioritizes roll back quickly and rich logs, and treating estimates as wild guesses.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:15Senior Engineer definition
- 5:30Key traits
- 6:41Leading projects
- 9:28Product life cycle
- 13:00Building MVP
- 15:30Growth phase
- 17:08System design interviews
- 20:49Technical negotiations
- 22:41Roadmaps
- 24:41On-call rotations
- 26:41Observability
- 27:50Audience feedback and worksheet access
- 28:54Closing
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