Select your current position
Pick a role and level — we'll show the growth path, skills and gap analysis.
Development path
Junior
0-2 years
Responsibility: Completing tasks under the guidance of senior colleagues. Learning the codebase, standards, and team processes. Writing code to spec, fixing simple bugs, writing tests.
Key skills:
Middle
2-5 years
Responsibility: Independently developing features from decomposition to deployment. Participating in code review. Optimizing performance. Mentoring junior developers. Taking part in architecture discussions.
Key skills:
Senior
5-8 years
Responsibility: Designing the architecture of components and services. Solving complex technical problems. Managing technical debt. Code review as a quality gatekeeper. Mentoring middle developers. Choosing technologies for new tasks.
Key skills:
Lead / Staff
7-12 years
Responsibility: Technical leadership of a team or area. Designing system architecture. Coordinating with other teams. Establishing standards and best practices. Participating in hiring. Planning the technical roadmap.
Key skills:
Principal
10+ years
Responsibility: Technical strategy at the company or domain level. Cross-organizational influence. Solving systemic business problems through technology. Mentoring lead engineers. Publicly representing the company.
Key skills:
Gap analysis: skills to develop
To reach the next level you'll need to develop:
Independently integrates ChatGPT and Claude API into production pipelines. Configures system prompts, function calling, and streaming responses. Compares models by quality and cost for specific tasks.
Independently conducts LLM fine-tuning: LoRA/QLoRA, instruction dataset preparation, hyperparameter tuning. Monitors training via W&B, evaluates results on held-out datasets.
Independently develops production-ready prompts: structured output parsing, error recovery prompts, multi-turn dialog management. Applies systematic approach to prompt design and testing.
Independently administers vector databases in production: Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant. Configures indexes (HNSW, IVF), optimizes recall vs latency, manages collections and metadata.
Independently designs evaluation pipelines: custom benchmarks, domain-specific eval sets, human evaluation protocols. Compares models across multiple metrics for production decision-making.