How to be a senior engineer

So you’re going to move to senior position be it through promotion or through your next career move. You are expected to have command over certain skills in the domain you’re currently working.

Praveen, aka Joe, and Tannishk have compiled a list of Frontend and Backend skills you are expected to have when you’re going to move to a senior engineering position.

This article is divided into three parts,

  1. Frontend Skills
  2. Backend Skills
  3. Common Skills

Let’s move into details without wasting any time

Senior Frontend Engineer Expected Skills:

  1. Fundamentals of HTML, CSS, Javascript
  2. Web security
  3. Web performance and analysis
  4. Accessibility
  5. Web page rendering flow
  6. What happens when you hit a URL in the browser
  7. Browser Developer Tools
  8. Any JavaScript Framework's in and out
  9. Client side rendering and Server Side Rendering
  10. Polyfills

Senior Backend Engineer Expected Skills:

  1. Any one Object oriented programming language (Java)
  2. Object Oriented Design and Design Patterns
  3. Databases (SQL and Nosql)
  4. Caches (Redis / memcache )
  5. Micro service frameworks like spring boot , flask Etc
  6. CI/CD
  7. Queuing systems like Kafka / RabbitMq / Sqs
  8. Search like elastic search / Solr
  9. Cloud tools like AWS or Azure etc

Senior Engineer Common Skills:

  1. Data Structure, Algorithm
  2. Design Patterns Knowledge and Implementation
  3. Unit Testing Framework and Integration Testing
  4. Version Control (git/ mercurial)
  5. System Design or ( Basic concepts of distributed systems )
  6. Containerisation (Docker / Kubernetes)
  7. Architectural Patterns Like SOA , Serverless , Monolithic
  8. Network Protocols
  9. Operation System Basics
  10. Thread Management Basics
  11. Your Side Projects
  12. The project details you have worked on in your company and your role in the team.
  13. Debugging Techniques


Happy Coding!