Dev Career Framework: Staff Frontend Engineer

Dev Staff Frontend Engineer

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Intermediate Backend | Senior Backend | Staff Backend | Dev Framework | Development Framework | Engineering Framework

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Dev Staff Frontend Engineers at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Leadership Competencies
• Technical Competencies
• Values Alignment

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Leadership Competencies

Engineering

A staff engineer generally operates at a team level scope, serving as the technical leader for one or more of their team’s domains of responsibility.

• Helps others across the organization understand their team’s domain and technology.
• Communicates clearly and effectively with team members and stable counterparts.
• Makes responsible decisions and evaluates tradeoffs impacting their team’s domain.
• Exhibits a deep understanding of their team’s features, how customers use them, and how they fit into the larger business.
• Improves team processes.
• Recognizes good solutions and clearly explains their merits to relevant stakeholders.
• Unblocks and enables team members and counterparts.
• Participates in processes which address complex technical challenges, such as the Architecture Design Process, as a DRI.

Development

• Able to deliver results despite starting from unclear requirements.

Technical Competencies

Engineering

• Has a broad skill-set with in-depth expertise in their team’s technical domain.
• Blends technical, product and design strategy, helping the team to be more productive.
• Represents their team as a domain expert when interfacing with other teams.
• Reaches beyond immediate needs, independently considering the longer-term, and is always looking beyond for ways to have a broad impact.
• Addresses challenges related to customers, quality, and security.
• Able to take on complex requirements and decompose them into a proposal of small deliverables.
• Engages in processes, such as the Architecture Design Process, to contribute to their team’s most challenging technical initiatives.

Development

• Advocates for quality and makes sure it is everyone’s responsibility.
• Mentors others on how to maintain and continue to raise the level of quality in everything we produce.
• Holds MRs to the high standards of our definition of done and collaborate with others to improve their implementation, tests and prevent any future regressions.
• Takes on initiatives that address performance issues and work with the Quality Department on any initiatives that would simplify life for our developers and contributors.
• Advocates for tech debt, customer issues, and high severity bugs.
• Advocates for security.
• Works closely with our internal security team.
• Provides guidance to others regarding how to properly address security issues and vulnerabilities.
• Expert at using the security features of our product and mentor to others to ensure we adopt our own tools.
• Provides feedback to the Secure team and act as a customer for this stage of the product.
• Able to take on complex requirements and decompose them into a proposal of small deliverables.
• Able to quickly pivot a solution based on feedback or complexity.
• Acts as a gate keeper for quality as a Maintainer of your team’s primary project (usually GitLab CE & EE).
• Able to guide and discuss performance issues from customers and quickly provide solutions that align with product direction.
• A champion of technical initiatives in this area and works closely with product to help prioritize the work.
• Understands how code for their group performs in production on GitLab.com and the impact of the architecture and dependencies required for the self-managed product.
• Actively participates in open source.
• Contributes bug fixes and features to upstream dependencies where appropriate.

• Expert knowledge of frontend programming languages and GitLab’s default frontend frameworks
• Able to identify and drive large architectural changes
• Able to analyze and contribute back improvements to third-party libraries
• Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes
• Identify, analyze, and fix slow and frontend code architecture and implementation

Values Alignment

GitLab

• Adhere to the Collaboration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Results Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Efficiency Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Iteration Competencies for this job grade.
• Adhere to the Transparency Competencies for this job grade.

Development

• Regularly engages with teams other than their own.
• Identifies situations where collaboration between teams will yield good results.
• Iteratively works towards results on cross-team projects without over-analysis.
• Works with the Engineering Manager to assign work to the team.
• Is able to take a long term goal and turn this into small actionable steps that can be implemented in an iterative way.
• Identifies and prevents decisions that are not “two-way door decisions”.
• Champions a no-blame culture and encourages learning from mistakes.