Quality Career Framework: Staff Backend Engineer, Engineering Productivity

These are the expected competencies of a Staff Backend Engineer, Engineering Productivity at GitLab.

Staff Backend Engineer, Engineering Productivity

Staff Backend Engineers, Engineering Productivity at GitLab are expected to exhibit the following competencies:

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.

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.

This table refers to the responsibility terms that are defined on the team page.

Responsibility	Description
See it and find it	Identify and implement changes to shorten developer feedback loops and implement improvements for product stages within a section
Do it for internal team	Implement productivity improvements with quantifiable benefits for GitLab product stages within a section
Dogfood use	Dogfood existing product features to improve the GitLab engineering workflows. Represent the Quality department as internal customer for at least one product group.
Engineering support	Implement KPI corrective actions and preventative measures. Identify areas for new department performance indicators.
Engineering workflow	Lead collaboration and implementation with product and engineering stakeholders to improve automation in support of product and engineering workflows
Do it for wider community	Identifies contributor productivity improvements for the wider GitLab community contributors
Dogfood build	Large enhancements to existing features or addition of new features. Your implementation has a large impact to a product category