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 configures ArgoCD Applications for multi-stage release pipelines with promotion gates and sync waves. Writes release-specific ApplicationSets with environment generators for consistent deployment across staging, canary, and production targets. Implements sync windows, manual approval hooks, and rollback strategies for controlled release delivery.
Configures blue-green deployment in Kubernetes with service switching. Automates smoke tests after traffic switching. Manages database migrations compatible with blue-green deployments.
Configures canary deployment with traffic splitting (Istio, Argo Rollouts). Defines success criteria and automated rollback triggers. Implements A/B testing within canary deployments.
Confidently applies Docker for release engineering in non-standard tasks. Independently selects the optimal approach and tools. Analyzes trade-offs and proposes improvements to existing solutions.
Configures branch protection rules, merge policies, and commit signing in GitHub/GitLab. Manages release branches and automates changelog generation. Implements GitOps workflow for configuration management.
Designs complex multi-job workflows with dependencies, matrix builds, and conditional steps. Optimizes cache strategies for pipeline acceleration. Creates reusable workflows and composite actions.
Confidently applies GitLab CI for release engineering in non-standard tasks. Independently selects the optimal approach and tools. Analyzes trade-offs and proposes improvements to existing solutions.
Confidently applies Helm charts for release engineering in non-standard tasks. Independently selects the optimal approach and tools. Analyzes trade-offs and proposes improvements to existing solutions.
Confidently applies Jenkins for release engineering in non-standard tasks. Independently selects the optimal approach and tools. Analyzes trade-offs and proposes improvements to existing solutions.
Confidently applies Kubernetes core for release engineering in non-standard tasks. Independently selects the optimal approach and tools. Analyzes trade-offs and proposes improvements to existing solutions.
Implements progressive delivery workflows with Argo Rollouts or Flagger. Configures metrics for automated promotion and rollback. Integrates feature flags into the deployment process.
Confidently applies SLI/SLO/SLA for release engineering in non-standard tasks. Independently selects the optimal approach and tools. Analyzes trade-offs and proposes improvements to existing solutions.
Confidently applies Terraform for release engineering in non-standard tasks. Independently selects the optimal approach and tools. Analyzes trade-offs and proposes improvements to existing solutions.