7 Key Transformations Along the IC Journey

You’re at a stoplight. The light turns green. You floor it—so does everyone else. Everyone crashes in the intersection. All the cars are totaled.

If you’re like 99.99% of people, you’ve encountered this scenario exactly zero times.

That’s because we have frameworks. And just like how traffic frameworks bring order to us on the road, career frameworks bring structure and direction to our growth.

One framework that has been mind blowingly insightful is the Leveling Framework - the industry standard for defining IC roles in software engineering.

Whenever I talk to people outside FAANG, I notice a common misconception about what these levels represent. It’s commonly oversimplified as someone being able to handle more complicated work as they progress through levels, while in actuality each level’s takeaways remain as a different mode of operating.

Transformation

As you read through each level, think in terms of transformation, not just a linear increase in complexity.

Just like gears in a car, each gear serves a specific purpose. We switch gears not only to accelerate but also to adapt to changing conditions (eg. inclines, declines, engine braking). Shifting to a lower gear isn’t a setback, it’s necessary any time we drive though construction zones or need to get to a full stop.

Specimen Dissection

Let’s dissect the levels and juxtapose them for some quick takeaways.

L3 (Entry Level) - Foundations and Meta-Learning

• Tech Skills: Learn team coding standards, relevant design patterns, frameworks, and tools.

• Soft Skills: Break down problems, ask insightful questions, respond constructively to feedback.

• Mindset: Task-oriented; manage imposter syndrome as part of growth.

• Focus: Complete tasks with quality, often learning multiple concepts (e.g., HTML, CSS, jQuery).

• Accountable for: Quality and accuracy of task completion.

• Pain Points: Information overload, debugging challenges, imposter syndrome, communication.

L4 (Mid Level) - Feature Ownership and Knowledge Depth

• Tech Skills: Advance debugging, error handling, and feature refinement.

• Soft Skills: Collaborate and cultivate knowledge-sharing relationships.

• Mindset: Manage feature lifecycles, focusing on system impact.

• Focus: Understand codebase interdependencies, own features end-to-end.

• Accountable for: Feature quality, reliability, and performance.

• Pain Points: Increased accountability, debugging pressure, scope creep, dependencies.

L5 (Senior Level) - Project Ownership and Team Alignment

• Tech Skills: Deliver projects end-to-end, manage technical debt, focus on scalability.

• Soft Skills: Build long-term stakeholder relationships, align with business goals.

• Mindset: Remove blockers for teammates, align with larger company goals.

• Focus: Quality project delivery, team alignment, mentoring others.

• Accountable for: Aligned, successful project delivery within company vision.

• Pain Points: Balancing technical and soft skills, stakeholder management, mentorship pressures.

L6 (Staff Level) - Cross-Functional Collaboration and Strategic Prioritization

• Tech Skills: Broad architecture understanding, connect projects to company goals.

• Soft Skills: Cross-functional collaboration, strategic prioritization, team alignment.

• Mindset: High-level prioritization based on business needs.

• Focus: Collaborate across teams to meet business goals, manage project priorities.

• Accountable for: Project prioritization, seamless collaboration.

• Pain Points: Cross-functional dependencies, business vs. tech priorities, influencing without authority.

L7 (Principal Level) - Technical Strategy and Influence Across Teams

• Tech Skills: Deep understanding of system architecture, design for scalability and resilience.

• Soft Skills: Lead cross-team alignment, coach senior engineers, drive technical standards.

• Mindset: Shape strategic direction of technology, balancing innovation with stability.

• Focus: Influence company-wide technical direction, align teams toward common goals.

• Accountable for: High-impact technical initiatives, large-scale system stability.

• Pain Points: Balancing stability with innovation, high-level alignment, handling organizational complexity.

L8 (Distinguished Engineer) - Organizational Alignment and Technical Leadership

• Tech Skills: Architect long-term, company-wide tech solutions; ensure cross-system compatibility.

• Soft Skills: Mentor across departments, advocate for engineering culture, influence exec-level decisions.

• Mindset: Drive innovation that aligns with company vision, focus on organizational tech health.

• Focus: Lead company tech strategy, foster collaboration across engineering and executive teams.

• Accountable for: Technical excellence and scalability at the organization level.

• Pain Points: Managing technical debt vs. new development, executive alignment, cross-departmental communication.

L9 (Fellow/Chief Engineer) - Visionary Leadership and Industry Influence

• Tech Skills: Define technology vision with global scalability; set industry standards.

• Soft Skills: Inspire future leaders, shape industry trends, build external partnerships.

• Mindset: Operate as a visionary, focusing on transformative innovations that shape the future of technology.

• Focus: Establish and communicate a forward-looking technical vision, mentor at all levels.

• Accountable for: Long-term technical vision and strategy, industry-leading innovations.

• Pain Points: Balancing organizational focus with industry influence, resource prioritization, scaling organizational impact.

Takeaways

Scoping Out

The overall theme is zooming out further and further away from actually building and fixing code line by line. Each step away requires a mindset shift as well as an entire new broad set of skills. That’s when you truly unlock a career gate.

Although I doubt every single engineer is going to be influencing the entire industry like a L9, it’s arguable that to some degree we can all influence the our entire organization and demonstrate traits anywhere from L3 to L8.

Shifting up is often just zooming out and learning to operate in a new way.

Scoping In

The most important point I’d like to emphasize is that as we move up levels, we still shift between different perspectives.

For example, when a stakeholder reports a silent error in production, begin with an L5 perspective to examine system as a whole and identify which feature is causing the issue. Once feature is identified, you can shift to an L4 perspective to analyze error logs and diagnose potential solutions. Finally, you can zoom in further with an L3 lens to address the bugs directly.

Conversely, once the bug is found, it’s wise to zoom out and consider how it impacts the systems and operations more broadly. Some questions to ask yourself are

• How does this affect related projects or interfaces?

• How could this impact other projects in our timeline?

• How does this affect our current priorities?

Mixing It Up

Also keep in mind that each company or even team culture can blend these levels totally different and your context may level things completely differently than presented above.

Your company may expect you to be delegation heavy earlier on, or may expect you to carry things individually even in later stages.

You’ll have to gauge prioritizing relationships vertically, horizontally, and diagonally depending on your company size and your role.