How Levels Work in Tech
Welcome to a special edition of Inside Silicon Valley. Today, we’re taking a look at the tech corporate ladder: levels.
What we’ll talk about here:
🤨 What are levels?
📊 What are some levels in the industry?
🗣 Why are they important?
🤯 Fun facts about levels
What are levels?
Levels are a label that is assigned to every engineer that reflects:
Their technical ability
Their leadership ability
Their salary
Their responsibilities
What are the levels?
Each company can label their levels however they want — and believe me, they do 😵💫. However, a lot of companies follow the following standard framework:
L2: Intern
L3: Entry-level/new-grad
L4: Mid-level
L5: Senior
L6: Staff
L7: Senior Staff or Principal
L8: Gigachad (just kidding — at this point, you’re likely just below VP, and an executive. Some companies call this “Distinguished”)
Companies that follow the above standard include:
Google
Instacart
Meta/Facebook (replace ‘L’ with ‘E’)
Coinbase (replace ‘L’ with ‘IC’ aka Individual Contributor)
Lyft (replace ‘L’ with ‘T’)
Some notable exceptions:
Apple starts at ICT2 (their equivalent of L3) aka 1 number lower
Amazon starts at L4 (their equivalent of L3) aka 1 number higher
Amazon tends to use their SDE label instead, where
SDE1 = entry level = their L4, and SDE2 = mid level = their L5, etc.
Microsoft is the most granular, and is purely numeric.
Their levels start at 59 (entry level) → 60 → 61 (mid) → 62 → 63 (Senior) → 64 → 65 (Principal) → 66 → 67 → 68 (Partner)
Netflix only has 2 levels: Entry-level, and Senior. That’s it.
This is because the vast majority of the time, they only hire Seniors.
Uber is basically the same, except their L5 is L5A, and then they have a L5B for Staff. Who knows why.
Why have levels?
In the tech world, if you are a certain level, then you are expected to be able to do certain responsibilities, get paid a certain band (the range of salaries at this level), and command authority if you’re a high enough level.
During the interview process, you are usually interviewing for a particular level. If you don’t meet the bar/qualifications for it, then you would either be rejected (most tech companies do this), or down-levelled (an offer is made at a level that is lower than the one you interviewed for).
Google is notorious for down-levelling people and extending low-ball offers because they know people will still accept the offer mostly for their “prestige”.
Your level is determined by:
Your interview performance
How well did you solve the technical problems? How well did you communicate? How well did you respond to feedback, help, follow-up questions?
For L2 to L4, this is usually mainly evaluating your data structures & algorithms, programming ability
For L5 and above: this is more heavily weighed towards systems design, leadership & communication skills, and past experience.
Past experience
What challenging problems did you previously solve? What level would this experience map to?
Googlers call this “trajectory”: if you have a ton of experience on your resume, but don’t perform to that standard, then this works against you.
Overall skillset
Higher levels expect more in-depth technical & domain knowledge, and are expected to be able to pick up new things much faster.
Once you’re at a level, you should have clearly defined expectations from you at that level, and clearly defined expectations for how you can get to the next level.
How important are levels, really?
It determines how much you can get paid.
Each level has a salary band associated with it. Where you’re paid along that band is known as your comp ratio (a comp ratio of 1.00 means you’re paid at the exact middle of the band. 0.94 means you’re paid 94% of the midway point, etc.)
The higher level you go, the more you get paid — simple enough. While there usually is a small bit of overlap between bands, your earnings ceiling is largely going to be capped by what your current level is.
It determines your day-to-day responsibilities on the job.
What do you day-to-day totally depends on your level. I know some people who put off their promo to Senior for as long as possible because they don’t want to take on those additional responsibilities. Generally, most companies view the responsibilities like the following:
L2 (Intern): Able to complete small, bite-sized, well-defined tasks
L3: Able to deliver small-medium, well-defined features
L4: Able to deliver medium-sized, ambiguously defined projects
L5 (Senior): Able to design, lead, and complete large, cross-functional projects. Also, mentor others.
L6 (Staff): Able to make improvements that affect entire organizations
L7+: Able to make changes that affect multiple industries, businesses, or geographies.
It (usually) determines someone’s technical skills
If someone at a certain level gets assigned a task, you are able to predict how well a task is going to get done. For example, if you need something reviewed, like a juicy PR or a design doc, you can usually trust a stamp of approval from a L5 or above more than someone lower level.
Fun Facts about Levels
Senior (L5) is known as a terminal level. This means you are not expected to push to the next level, and can essentially “coast” at this level until the end of your career. This is what most engineers end up doing, and that’s OK 👌
To get promoted to the next level, you usually have to submit a promo packet.
This is a document that highlights what you did, what you accomplished, why it matters, and most importantly, why those tasks are tasks at the level you want to get promoted to.
You usually work with your manager, teammates, on this document, and then it’s sent out to a promo committee that reviews it, and ultimately decides if you should be promoted or not.
You usually have to be at least L5 (most places require you to be at least L6) in order to transition to an Engineering Manager.
The GOAT levels site is levels.fyi.
And that’s it! Was this article helpful? How does your company do levels?
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