Dev Career Framework: Principal Engineer

Principal Engineer

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Dev Framework | Development Framework | Engineering Framework

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Principal Engineers at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

• Leadership Competencies
• Technical Competencies
• Values Alignment

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Leadership Competencies

Engineering

A principal engineer generally operates at an organizational (sub-department or stage, for example) level scope, serving as their organization’s technical lead and connecting their organization to other parts of GitLab.

• Helps team members of all levels understand their organization’s domain and technology through clear and effective communication.
• Makes responsible decisions and evaluates tradeoffs impacting their organization and various aspects of the business.
• Exhibits a deep understanding of their organization’s features, how customers use them, and how they fit into the larger business.
• Improves processes at the organization level.
• Recognizes good solutions to complex problems impacting multiple domains and clearly explains their merits to relevant stakeholders.
• Unblocks and enables team members and counterparts across multiple teams.
• Participates in processes which address complex technical challenges, such as the Architecture Design Process, as a DRI and as a coach.
• Advises on resourcing requirements and provides feedback on promotions into technical leadership roles.

Development

• Able to deliver results despite starting from unclear requirements.

• Able to do a deep-dive in the GitLab codebase on any given API endpoint to understand it’s functionality and explain it to others
• Works frequently with other teams to coordinate major changes leading to efficient solutions
• Performs Code Reviews across the GitLab Codebase on a regular cadence

Technical Competencies

Engineering

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

Development

• The Principal Engineer role acts as the individual equivalent of a Senior Engineering Manager, Development.
• Extends that of the Staff Frontend Engineer or the Staff Backend Engineer responsibilities
• Collaborates and makes proposals across several teams on their engineering work, and helps their team members make informed decisions in alignment with the sub-department strategic plans.
• Exposes technology and organizational needs across their sub-department.
• Teach, mentor, grow, and provide advice to other domain experts, individual contributors, across several teams in their sub-department.
• Play a central role in technical, business, and organizational contributions affecting the sub-department/department.
• Plan improvements and features with a 6 month view.
• Solves technical problems of the highest scope, complexity, and ambiguity for their sub-department.
• Interfaces with EMs and Senior management, and enables Staff Engineers to engage on department-level aspects of larger (sub-department wide) initiatives.
• Looks for innovation opportunities between several teams with a willingness to experiment and to boldly confront problems of large complexity and scope.
• Proposes initial technical implementations which support architectural changes that solve scaling and performance problems.
• Ensures that OKR level goals are aligned across several teams in their sub-department.
• Guides conversations to remove blockers and encourage collaboration across teams.
• Provides a point of escalation for sub-department teams facing complex technical challenges.
• Attain a measurable impact on the work of sub-department teams.
• Interact with customers and other external stakeholders as a consultant and spokesperson for the work of your sub-department.
• Exposes the work of the sub department and their business impact internally.
• Knowledgeable in all specialities practiced within the department or sub-department

• Identifies slow and inefficient code across multiple products
• Vast knowledge of server side programming languages and their frameworks
• Improves engineering standards, tooling, and processes

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 Senior 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.