SWE 1 - Software Engineer

I deliver high-quality code to production with direction from my teammates.

Scope

You execute against defined tasks with known solutions. You contribute to the mission of your team with guidance from your manager. You contribute to projects within your team and ensure your part is delivered with high-quality.

Craft

Your focus is dedicated to learning the WHOOP stack and growing your foundational knowledge in pursuit of contributing high-quality code for your projects.

You are learning the ins and outs of your team’s development lifecycle and rituals. You attain knowledge through rigorously reading code and documentation and applying your learnings to your daily work. You adapt to code review feedback, boosting the quality of your next contribution by building on past reviews. You start to learn how to estimate work within each of your projects and improve estimations milestone after milestone. You are learning what operational excellence looks like at WHOOP through participation in on-call rotations and reading through response playbooks. You seek knowledge of appropriate responses to issues and rely on your teammates to help guide you through issues you have yet to experience.

Responsibility	Behaviors
Technical	I participate in code reviews, read code in surrounding service(s), and develop a sense of where my code lives in WHOOP architecture. I write quality code on my portions of projects to help deliver projects on time and deliver impact to customers.
Scoping & Estimation	I am actively practicing estimations on my project contributions, seeking to improve each milestone.
Quality	I take time to dive into the product and understand our customers' perspective. I am learning how to test my code such that I cover core user journeys.
Operational Excellence	I actively grow my knowledge of systems my team owns and participate in on-call rotations, escalating when necessary.

Communication and Collaboration

You participate in team meetings and ask questions to ensure you clearly understand the reasoning behind your team's decisions. You shadow peers through team processes and begin to practice executing them on your own.

You collaborate closely with your peers, observing their contributions and impact on projects within your team. You check in frequently with your team, seeking feedback and detailing your progress on projects. When you are blocked or require further clarity on a project you first take steps to research your challenge. If you are still blocked, you ask your team for help, communicating the problem and potential solutions you have thought through.

You are an outstanding peer to your team. You collaborate with teammates through projects and challenges. You work with those around you in a respectful and constructive manner and invest in learning about the people around you.

Responsibility	Behaviors
Autonomy	When I am stuck, I gauge how much time I should spend researching before asking for help based on my estimations for delivery. If I am still blocked after spending this time, I ask my peers for help seeking constructive feedback.
Accountability	I check in frequently with my team to communicate my progress and status of my work.
Data Driven	I look to analyze data around the projects I participate in and learn how to communicate their impact with guidance from my manager.
Clarity	I ask questions when I do not have clarity in pursuit of a strong understanding. I learn the strategy of the 5 whys.

Coaching

You begin to coach the co-ops closest to your team on their craft through peer coding and code reviews. You collaborate closely with them by walking them through documentation relevant to your projects, detailing code patterns, and working through how-to documents together. You look to provide co-ops growth through increased contribution size in your projects.

Responsibility	Behaviors
Mentorship	I look to impact the co-ops in my close vicinity and help them onboard. I provide feedback on areas they can improve and encourage them in their contributions.
Team Influence	I shadow my peers during interviews and provide written feedback on candidates, learning how to gauge their qualifications. I communicate frequently with co-ops to increase my awareness of what they would like to learn and how they can contribute to projects within my team.

Moving to the SWE 2 level

You have been at the SWE1 Level for 12 months and operating at the SWE2 level for at least 6 months.

Here are some areas you might focus on to bridge your experience at the next level:

• You start to improve existing best practices, iterating on them and presenting your changes. You begin to contribute to areas your team owns beyond your assigned project and seek to continuously improve them over time.
• During planning meetings and design reviews, you start to independently scope and estimate your own section of projects. You begin to help advise others on estimations in areas of the team’s codebase that you are intimately familiar with.
• You broaden your impact by coaching SWE1s through projects that you collaborate on, up-leveling their quality and simplicity of solutions. You begin to level up your peers through presentations and Tech Talks, educating engineers around you.