Senior Software Engineer

Technical Excellence

• Produces code and designs that serve as the benchmark for the team - clean, well-structured, and idiomatic to the language and ecosystem in use.
• Spots issues in design and implementation that others miss, and raises them constructively with reasoned alternatives.
• Drives quality with conviction without being rigid or dismissive of pragmatic trade-offs.
• Evaluates technical trade-offs explicitly, documenting reasoning in design proposals or architecture decision records.
• Proactively identifies opportunities to improve system performance, reliability, or maintainability rather than waiting for problems to surface.
• Demonstrates awareness of emerging technologies and assesses their relevance to current problems with clear judgement.
• Applies security-conscious thinking throughout design and implementation, treating it as a first-class concern rather than a retrofit.
• Understands system behaviour under load and failure, and designs for resilience from the outset rather than as an afterthought.

Delivery & Ownership

• Takes full ownership of complex work from inception to production - not just the technically interesting parts.
• Does not wait to be told what to do - identifies what needs to happen and makes it happen.
• Holds themselves accountable to the team's commitments and delivery standards.
• Manages their own time and commitments reliably, flagging risk early when scope or estimates shift.
• Breaks down large deliverables into well-scoped increments that reduce risk and enable team parallelism.
• Identifies upstream and downstream dependencies early and coordinates across them proactively rather than discovering them mid-sprint.
• Tracks the health of their delivery area and raises concerns before they become incidents or missed commitments.
• Follows through after code is merged - monitoring, validating, and iterating based on production behaviour.

Quality & Craft

• Writes tests as a natural part of development, covering unit, integration, and edge cases without prompting.
• Conducts code reviews that are constructive, specific, and focused on the right level of concern for the context.
• Applies consistent standards to their own work without needing external enforcement or reminders.
• Drives down technical debt systematically, proposing and executing improvement work alongside delivery commitments.
• Champions agreed engineering practices within the team and raises it constructively when standards are being eroded.
• Produces documentation that is genuinely useful - clear, accurate, and kept current as systems evolve.
• Treats non-functional requirements - performance, security, and observability - as first-class delivery concerns.
• Demonstrates continuous improvement in their own craft through deliberate learning, experimentation, and honest self-reflection.

Communication & Influence

• Communicates technical context clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, adjusting their style and level of detail appropriately.
• Writes technical proposals and design documents that are well-reasoned, concise, and actionable by the reader.
• Provides feedback in reviews and discussions that is direct, respectful, and oriented towards improvement rather than criticism.
• Represents the team's technical perspective in cross-functional forums with confidence and clarity.
• Raises concerns and disagreements constructively - with evidence, context, and alternative proposals rather than just objections.
• Listens actively in technical discussions, genuinely integrating others' perspectives before forming conclusions.
• Surfaces technical context that product and delivery stakeholders need in order to make well-informed decisions.
• Builds credibility through consistent delivery and thoughtful communication, not through assertion of seniority or volume of opinion.

Developing Others

• Invests genuinely in the growth of junior engineers - not just when it is convenient or low-effort.
• Gives feedback that is specific, honest, and constructive rather than vague, softened, or purely flattering.
• Creates learning opportunities through how they work - pairing, design walkthroughs, and review conversations.
• Identifies growth opportunities for engineers around them and actively creates space for those opportunities within delivery.
• Models the behaviours and standards they expect from others, consistently and visibly rather than only in formal settings.
• Creates psychological safety in technical discussions, making it genuinely safe for others to ask questions and share half-formed ideas.
• Supports onboarding of new team members with patience, structure, and deliberate context-sharing.
• Notices when engineers are struggling and takes action - whether through direct support, adjusted pairing, or a conversation with leadership.

Strategic Thinking

• Considers the longer-term implications of technical decisions rather than optimising only for the immediate solution.
• Understands the business and product context their work sits within, using that understanding to prioritise and sequence effectively.
• Identifies systemic patterns in technical problems rather than addressing each instance individually and in isolation.
• Contributes to architectural direction beyond their immediate feature area, thinking at service and system level.
• Anticipates how current decisions will constrain or enable future work, and advocates for the right trade-offs accordingly.
• Evaluates new tools, languages, and approaches with a critical eye for organisational fit and long-term value - not just technical novelty.
• Connects engineering quality to business outcomes, articulating clearly why technical investment matters in language stakeholders understand.
• Raises strategic concerns early rather than retrospectively, when options are still open and trade-offs are still navigable.

Collaboration

• Works effectively across team boundaries - sharing context, aligning on approaches, and actively avoiding duplication of effort.
• Builds strong working relationships with engineers, product managers, and delivery leads within and adjacent to their team.
• Engages constructively in technical disagreements, prioritising the best outcome over being right.
• Contributes to a team culture where knowledge is shared openly and no individual is a single point of failure.
• Adapts their working style to the needs of their collaborators rather than defaulting solely to their own preferences.
• Participates actively in engineering communities and cross-team forums, contributing substance rather than just attendance.
• Seeks out diverse perspectives when making significant technical decisions, especially when their own assumptions are likely to be narrow.
• Follows through on commitments made to other teams and stakeholders, communicating proactively when circumstances change.

Engineering Practice

• Follows and champions agreed development practices - branching strategy, CI/CD, review processes, and deployment standards.
• Actively contributes to improving team-level engineering practices through retrospectives, proposals, and direct experimentation.
• Maintains a working awareness of the operational health of systems they own or regularly contribute to.
• Participates in on-call or incident response with professionalism, using each event as a learning opportunity.
• Contributes to post-incident reviews with thoughtful analysis and specific, actionable recommendations.
• Applies observability practices consistently - meaningful logging, well-defined metrics, and distributed tracing as standard.
• Keeps dependencies, tooling, and libraries current as part of ongoing delivery work rather than treating it as a separate periodic initiative.
• Treats the developer experience of systems they own - APIs, libraries, internal tooling - as a legitimate and important quality concern.