The past month, we’ve done deepdives in the newsletter on what a senior software engineer is at Big Tech, and at scaleups. This issue looks at two companies from the 15 covered in those articles: we cover Wise and Amazon.

Wise

Wise – formerly Transferwise – is a publicly traded Fintech, valued at $6.5B at time of publication. The company employs more than 5,000 people in 17 countries. Its biggest engineering hubs are London (UK,) Estonia, Austin (US,) Budapest (Hungary,) and Singapore. The company not only makes its engineering levels public, but also its compensation ranges across all regions. Here’s how levels and compensation line up:

Career levels and compensation targets at Wise. These numbers are gross base salary ones: equity comes on top of these. Source: Wise engineering career map

Harsh Sinha, the CTO of Wise added additional context to the above numbers:

• The numbers refer to gross base salary.
• Equity is paid on top of these, and Wise does not have cash bonuses. The bonuses are ‘loaded in’ to the equity awards.
• The US numbers are clearly higher than other regions. As context, the numbers reflect what the company has found it takes to close great engineering talent in the respective markets.
• Wise has a much smaller US footprint, engineering-wise, and has scaled their engineering team heavily in the EU and UK, over the years.

Summarizing L3 (senior engineer) expectations at Wise:

The senior level at Wise.

I asked Balazs Barna, the Head of US Engineering at Wise to give his two cents on the senior role. He said:

“The Senior Engineer role at Wise is the equivalent to an Engineering Manager 1 on the IC track. Senior Engineers are not only expected to lead significant projects in their teams, but they have a say in whether that feature is worth building or not. After all, there is nothing worse than an engineer solving a problem that doesn’t need to be solved in the first place!

We put a lot of emphasis on communication and prioritization and the ability to unblock yourself or your team – this comes on top of the programming and design skills.

A ‘typical’ Senior Engineer to me is someone who seeks out difficult problems, and has the skills to solve them in a sustainable way. They strive to build things fast, but also know when we have to slow down to go faster.”

Amazon: SDE3

Amazon’s SDE3 level maps to what the industry commonly refers to as “senior engineer.” A summary of this level’s typical expectations:

A summary of Amazon’s SDE3 level.

Amazon’s SDE3 definition is closer to what is considered a “team lead” or “tech lead” role at many companies, and so I view this SDE3 role as being at the upper end of a senior engineer definition. Amazon emphasizes a few different things at this level: