Software Engineering

Responsibilities of a Senior Software Engineer

A Story About Responsibilities and the Engineer’s Role In It

Recently, I was tasked with interviewing for a Senior position at the current company I work at, and I actually thought to myself — what makes a good Senior Software Engineer?

I’ve gone through the whole deal — I’ve been a Junior, Mid, and then a Senior Software Engineer, and I saw all kinds of different “definitions” for the aforementioned roles.

I came up with a few things, which I believe should be common in the industry for describing this role, so today I want to outline the “responsibilities” of a Senior Software Engineer, and hopefully, it might help whoever is reading, whether it might be a Senior Engineer or someone hiring one. Let’s dig in!

Senior Software Engineer

Image Credit — [email protected]

The Senior Engineer is an individual role within the scope of a team that (not necessarily) reports directly to the Team Lead.

Technically, the Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer roles are not much different each from other. Both require high engineering skills, and both drive, manage and care about the team. The only difference should be that the Team Lead is the go-to person, for more managerial tasks, but an Engineer to fill the Senior shoes must be capable to fulfill the Team Lead role as well at any given point in time.

Other denominators of a Senior Engineer, are a proven record of driving initiatives, bringing, and delivering value. The goal of this role is to create value by delivering stable and scalable engineering solutions.

Senior Engineers have to have the knowledge, breadth, and proficiency in delivering software within its end-to-end life cycle.

What is the end-to-end life cycle?

Software (System) Development Life Cycle or SDLC is essentially a model for managing software development, and it can be broken down into multiple stages. Many refer to these as the end-to-end life cycle stages.

Software Life Cycle Phases — Image by Author

The stages might vary from company to company, in some scenarios from team to the team even. Still, the goal is always bringing a project or product from its initial idea and conception all the way to deployment. The life cycle mainly consists from:

• Planning and Analysis Stage
• Design and Prototyping Stage
• Software Development
• Software Testing
• Integration and Deployment
• Operations and Maintenance Stage

The Senior Engineer contributes to all of these stages, not only the ones related to development. Besides just contributing to each of these stages, a Senior Engineer will drive and own the most critical pieces. One needs to understand and be capable of taking on a set of business requirements, refining them, designing the solution, and finally delivering it, in addition to writing the implementation itself, testing it, integrating it, and then maintaining it.

Ownership mentality is a big thing and perhaps carries some buzz, but it definitely is real.

The Senior Software Engineer has to embody that ownership mentality in every aspect.

A Senior does not just execute tasks, which might be the scope for lesser roles. They will need to often fill in different shoes, sometimes working close to the business side, while driving the team to deliver the implementation.

There is no set of predefined approaches for a day-to-day Senior Engineer’s scope of work, but they need to distill the priorities, define and resolve problems, determine what is in and what is out of scope, identify and prevent risks and generate solutions and need to be capable to do that on their own. Senior Engineer very often collaborates with the Product Owner, as well as with other teams when needed.

Senior Engineers are able to deal with complexity and simplify problems involving many systems, acting as “team architects” for team products. When
applicable, they build components that might be shareable across the company. They also contribute to initiatives in the scope of the entire company or division, not only the team.

One more required skill is handling team processes, Scrum, providing good practices, and acting as a mentor to other team members.

Seniors have to be influential, make an impact, drive the team, and act as role models for others and should embody the company values.

If I’d need to compose a rough list of the responsibilities, these would be:

• Develop quality software design and architecture
• Drive initiatives
• Take care of the team
• Mentor other engineers
• Deliver value in every aspect

Obviously, for checking others as well as ourselves, we need some metrics that can prove the performance of a Senior Engineer. These often include:

• The impact made on the company/division level, whether that impact is related to technical solutions, engineering processes, or others
• Product performance — software quality, such as Throughput and Response Time of the software in question
• Product Usability
• Code Quality
• Quality of bringing an idea from conception to deployment
• Architecture Scalability, Design, and Optimization
• Automation
• Good SCRUM Practices
• Mentoring other engineers

Obviously, there are many metrics, goals, and attributes that define a Senior Software Engineer, but hopefully the above summarizes a good part of it.

This article is about how a Senior needs to act and what their goals should be.

If you are a Software Engineer reading this, I hope this text will help you as an individual, whether you already are a Senior, or you are looking forward to becoming one. Additionally, I hope this text helps and guides those either recruiting and those who need to define a set of principles and a description for use within a company or division.

Thank you for reading! 🎉