<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:
22px;">Software engineering is the systematic development of software through the
requirements engineering, design, implementation, documentation, verification &
validation, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and re-engineering phases of the
software development lifecycle. This document outlines the expectations of a
Medidata engineer’s technical and soft skills at each software engineering
level in order to provide a roadmap for development and career growth and strive
for <strong>Transparency</strong> and <strong>Consistency</
strong> in our hiring, evaluation, and promoting processes.</span></p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:
22px;"><strong>Transparency</strong></span><br />In order to be active and engaged
in their professional growth, engineers need to know the criteria they are being
measured against and how they can develop within their current roles and raise
their game to the next level.</p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:
22px;"><strong>Consistency</strong></span><br />All engineers should be measured
against consistent standards that remain as fair as possible to ensure equity in
how Medidata rewards success. The best way an engineer can develop further within
their current role or demonstrate they are ready to be considered for a promotion
is by consistently exhibiting performance at a higher level to their team and
manager over an extended period of time.</p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 22px;"><strong>Table of
Contents</strong></span></p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"><img alt="Table of contents" class="jive_macro
jive_macro_toc" src="/images/tiny_mce4/themes/advanced/img/toc.png" jivemacro="toc"
/></p>
<h1 style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 24px; padding: 0px;">Categories</h1>
<p style="padding: 0px;">These four competencies remain consistent across each of
the six engineering levels.</p>
<ul style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;">
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding:
0px;">The<span> </span><strong>technical</strong><span> </span>category
focuses on technical skills, including an engineer’s mastery of best
practices, code reviews, code stewardship, code quality, testing, design, and
debugging.</li>
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding:
0px;">The<span> </span><strong>execution</strong><span> </span>category
focuses on how an engineer gets things done. This includes planning, scoping,
estimating, getting unstuck, taking ownership, strategic alignment,
product/business understanding, taking a long-term customer-centric view, and
vision.</li>
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding:
0px;">The<span> </span><strong>impact</strong><span> </span>category
looks at an engineer’s level of impact and influence within and outside of
the organization, including leadership, knowledge sharing, mentoring, teaching,
hiring, on-boarding, and representing the Medidata brand.</li>
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding:
0px;">The<span> </span><strong>behaviors</strong><span> </span>category
is the same across all the engineering levels. It looks at the traits that make an
engineer trustworthy and professional: accountability, self-awareness, respect,
consensus building, handling conflict, receiving feedback, listening, and
empathy.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<h2>Behaviors</h2>
<h4 style="font-weight: bold; padding: 0px;">Every day you bring your A-Game</h4>
<ul style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;">
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding: 0px;">You engage with passion and get things
done holding yourself and others accountable. You plan and prioritize commitments
that drive business results.</li>
</ul>
<h4 style="font-weight: bold; padding: 0px;">You embrace the TEAM</h4>
<ul style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;">
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">You are willing
to be part of something bigger than yourself. You are self-aware; you learn &
adjust through feedback and self reflection. You build strong relationships and
collaborate both within and outside of your function to achieve shared outcomes.
You understand healthy conflict is necessary and you manage conflict
productively. </li>
</ul>
<h4 style="font-weight: bold; padding: 0px;">Everyone is a leader</h4>
<ul style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;">
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">You create
psychological safety on the team which inspires high performance. You invest in
others by coaching and giving feedback, help the team learn from mistakes and you
ask for input from many different perspectives.</li>
</ul>
<h4 style="font-weight: bold; padding: 0px;">You deliver an amazing customer
experience</h4>
<ul style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;">
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding: 0px;">You listen to the customer to
understand their needs and thrive on delighting the customer by creating value in
every product, service and/or experience.</li>
</ul>
<h4 style="font-weight: bold; padding: 0px;">You are an innovator</h4>
<ul style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;">
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">You strive to
“unlearn” and “relearn” to adjust to changing conditions in
the market, our business, and our customers. You actively seek different
perspectives and pilot new ideas, and you are willing to fail fast and move
forward.</li>
</ul>
<h4 style="font-weight: bold; padding: 0px;">You are a master communicator</h4>
<ul style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px;">
<li style="margin: 0.2em 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">You proactively
communicate issues and topics, sharing bad news quickly when necessary. You include
the right people at the right times. You break down complex issues in a concise and
simple way, ensuring diverse audiences understand the topic.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<h1>Engineering Levels</h1>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">There is no right or best way to grow
as an engineer at Medidata. Engineers should use this document as a reference and a
guide (not a checklist) for planning their career growth with their manager. Not
every item below will apply to every engineer, and there are many great ways to
develop as an engineer that are not captured here. Each of the levels offers many
different ways an engineer can improve across a spectrum of competencies. Every
engineer will have a mix of abilities across different levels. Medidata aims to
ensure each engineer is recognized at the most accurate level for their unique
skill set and contributions.</p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">Engineers demonstrating most of the
technical, execution, and impact expertise at a level are succeeding within their
role. Engineers aiming to move between roles should demonstrate consistent
performance at the level they are trying to achieve.</p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">Engineering levels are cumulative.
Each level encompasses those preceding it, and engineers at all levels are expected
to embody Medidata's core values and behaviors.</p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<h2 style="padding: 0px;">Associate Applications Engineer</h2>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><em>Associate Application Engineers
are focused on learning and growth. They participate in all team scrum exercises,
ask tough questions, hone their engineering skills, and contribute to
implementations and design discussions.</em></p>
<h4 style="padding: 0px;">Technical</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Learns their team's stack, best practices, and
codebase.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Works on scoped problems with some guidance.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes clean code and tests (unit and integration) and
iterates based on feedback.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Submits pull requests for completed work and incorporates
pull request feedback into their solutions.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Instruments code for effective logging and
monitoring.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Participates in code reviews and design meetings.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Participates in the Super Hero rotation.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Completes all relevant Learning Labs on time.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Execution</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Commits to and completes tasks within the expected time
frame.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Estimates stories and tasks methodically, refining
estimation skills based on how long stories actually take.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Learns how users interact with the product or service by
attending groomings, plannings, daily scrums, and 3 amigos sessions with
testers.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Learns the business value of the product or service by
asking Product about requirements.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Learns coding, deployment, monitoring, and debugging
tools and resources.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Seeks input from colleagues with area expertise and
technology-specific knowledge.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Requests feedback regularly and quickly responds to and
integrates feedback.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes clear documentation for features with narrow
scope.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Communicates work status to teammates and manager
effectively during daily scrums.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Impact</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Has project, service, or team-level impact.
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Makes pull requests to production and supporting code
every release.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Submits work that implements or improves customer
workflows.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Reveals work frequently.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<h2>Applications Engineer</h2>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><em>Applications Engineers are
focused on delivering quality implementations on time and to specification. They
succeed as part of a team, working with other engineers, testers, and product
people to contribute to high-quality releases.</em></p>
<h4 style="padding: 0px;">Technical</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Has a solid understanding of all the major customer APIs
and workflows in their team's code base.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Scopes and implements complex stories (5s and 8s) with
minimal guidance.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Consistently follows best practices.
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes maintainable code.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes performant code.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes clean code.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Identifies opportunities to reduce code complexity.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Provides helpful, timely code reviews.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Is responsible for designing features and creating or
updating the technical design documentation for those features.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Contributes to and sometimes drives technical designs and
design meetings.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Runs 3 amigos sessions with testers.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Debugs effectively and is capable of diagnosing the root
cause of client issues within their code base independently.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes and approves Change Management Procedure (CMP)
requests.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Execution</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Engages Product Management to gain clarification,
urgency, and context around how all features and tasks fulfill a specific business
requirement and align with Medidata's business goals.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Breaks down stories to reduce complexity, plan, estimate,
and cut scope in order to ship on time.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Detects problems or oversights in requirements.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Takes ownership and can work autonomously on most
development tasks within their product or service, delivering quality code
consistently on time.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Picks up testing work when necessarily to help teammates
finish their stories on time.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Partners with Testers during the design and
implementation phases of development to ensure all their software is fully testable
and tested before it is done.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Cleans up the trash (fixes issues they discover even when
no one is watching).</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Runs deployments with support.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Responds to customer support requests</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Proactively contributes to internal technical
documentation content and form (this does not apply to customer-facing
documentation which is owned by Product).</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Is accountable end-to-end, through planning, design,
implementation, deploy, maintenance, and monitoring.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Assists with on-boarding new engineers.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Impact</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Mentors new or more junior engineers.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Finds ways to help teammates achieve their goals.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Participates in hiring and provides clear, timely
feedback on candidates.</li>
</ul>
<h2 style="padding: 0px;"><br />Senior Applications Engineer</h2>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><em>Senior Application Engineers are
focused on dissecting complexity in order to deliver expert solutions to extremely
challenging technical problems. They are proficient at working independently,
leading some design discussions, and providing support to teammates.</em></p>
<h4 style="padding: 0px;">Technical</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Has a deep understanding of their team's codebase or
specialized expertise in many relevant technical areas for their team (eg. database
migrations, deployments, or specific modules or workflows).</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Independently implements solutions for features, epics,
and well-defined services within their area of expertise.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Is able to complete any well-defined story on their
team's backlog.
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Is able to deliver new projects from scratch.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Helps define processes.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes meaningful code reviews in comments on pull
requests.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Manages open-ended problems and ambiguity in tasks and
stories by proactively and sometimes independently resolving blockers.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Makes well-reasoned design decisions, identifying
potential issues, trade-offs, risks, and the appropriate level of abstraction.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Demonstrates a proficiency in all relevant technical
skills and is able to move quickly.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Maintains awareness of industry trends and tools.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Debugs issues throughout the stack, codebase,
application, or system in various environments (e.g. sandbox or validation),
finding and reporting the root cause or a viable workaround in a timely
manner.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Investigates production support issues raised by
customers and provides workarounds or bug write-ups as a result.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Can jump to adjacent teams for one or more sprints to
ensure the solution delivers on its technical milestones in a timely manner.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Is able to explain the technical challenges within their
area of expertise to non-technical audiences on every story during groomings.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Execution</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Understands how people use the product/service(s) they
build, and how their work fits into Medidata's wider product roadmap and uses this
knowledge to help groom stories geared towards fulfilling specific business
requirements.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Executes pragmatically, consistently delivering high-
quality, non-disruptive, customer-facing, and highly-available releases.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Identifies and communicates the risk and health of their
services and workflows in terms of their ability to scale and integrate with other
Medidata technologies in the short-term (6 month) and long-term (2+ years).</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Understands and helps evolve the technical vision of
their product or service.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Asks for guidance in unfamiliar areas, pulls in others as
needed, and persists in the face of roadblocks.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Uses analytics and product understanding to inform
decisions and measure impact.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Exercises empathy for their internal and external users
and stakeholders.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Ensures documentation exists for all critical systems and
creates it when it does not.
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes technical guides published on Medidata Express or
Confluence.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Impact</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Elevates testing practices and supports Business-Driven
Development (BDD) and Test Driven Development (TDD).</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Contributes to the foundational good of their technology
area and engineering overall, helping to define patterns and canonical examples,
plus paying down tech debt.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Debates teammates and other technical stakeholders about
technical tradeoffs and decisions.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Shares their experience and expertise to help others
grow.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Can lead and coach other engineers and testers within
their team.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Volunteers to champion appropriate team retrospective
items.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<h2>Staff Applications Engineer</h2>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><em>Staff Applications Engineers are
focused on a team's execution in order to satisfy customer and business
requirements. They have an intimate understanding of how customers use their
product, and they organize engineers on a team, guiding people in their tasks and
managing integrated design components, to deliver service-level epics on time and
to specification.</em></p>
<h4 style="padding: 0px;">Technical</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Drives technical decision making, with engineering
managers and architects, that affect complex systems and mission-critical
areas.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Consistently delivers code that sets the standard for
quality and maintainability by following coding best practices, using patterns
wherever possible, coding for extensibility, and writing in supportability (i.e.
logging, monitoring, profiling tools, etc.).</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Writes highly insightful, comprehensive code reviews with
an eye towards bigger-picture concepts like backwards incompatible changes, new
dependencies, and potential performance issues.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Demonstrates deep understanding of the solution's entire
architecture, systematically thinking through potential design impacts to other
teams and the company.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Has a deep understanding of how the system is used by
dependent services and applications in terms of customer interactions, common
workflows, pain points, and metrics.
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Participates in customer calls and sits with them to
provide direct support and gather feedback about how their product or service is
used when necessary.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Manages open-ended problems and ambiguity in customer
requests and requirements.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Demonstrates a holistic and strategic mindset when
developing and designing new modules, products, services, and resources. Focuses on
the big technical picture.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Explores technologies impacting their entire product,
service, team, or department.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Execution</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Is responsible for successfully planning and executing
projects involving multiple developers and complex requirements, prioritizing
strategically.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Helps define the technical roadmap for a service or suite
of services and sets the vision for long-term projects by designing for scale and
reliability with the regulatory environment and business's long-term vision in
mind.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Understands long-term business context for the project
and uses this understanding to plan and prioritize the backlog with Product
Management.
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Partners with Project Management to cut scope, define
epics, and articulate technical stories in a succinct way to achieve a specific
business vision.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Partners with Product Management to drive requirements
and instruments code to derive insights into how customers use their products and
services.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Mitigates risk by breaking down stories pushing for
smaller, more frequent releases.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Identifies, defines, and solves strategic problems,
thinking holistically about the whole system.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Delegates tasks to other engineers as necessary to
deliver service-level milestones on time.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Contributes to all major architectural decisions and
reads all technical specifications within their product area on Medidata Express
and elsewhere, tracking status and considering implications to other systems.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Employs expert organizational skills to simultaneously
handle several priorities and context switch between multiple work streams without
losing focus.
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">For example, continuing feature development while waiting
for updates on support work or switching between helping other application
engineers with different features.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Steps up to spearhead cross-solution debugging issues
even when it is not clear the issue originates from their project or solution.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Proactively improves documentation based on cross-
functional meetings with internal or external customers.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Impact</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Identifies and advocates for resources needed by their
team.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Identifies and advocates for foundational work and
practice improvements in their technology area.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Clearly communicates technical issues, and ties work
clearly to company objectives.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Sought out as mentor and provider of technical guidance
and coaching.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Motivates, empowers, and enables teammates to achieve
higher level of performance.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Educates others about the work of the team.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Coaches and helps teammates focus on and prioritize the
most important work.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Coaches the team on agile meeting practices.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Analyzes and improves upon interview and onboarding
practices.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Leads initiatives and meetings within team and technology
area.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Can lead multi-person, multi-sprint projects.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Contributes meaningful input to hiring decisions.</li>
</ul>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<h2 style="padding: 0px;">Senior Staff Applications Engineer</h2>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><em>Senior Staff Applications
Engineers are focused on a solution's execution. They teach and organize engineers
across multiple teams guiding people on tasks and managing integrated design
components to deliver solution-level epics, including cross-service designs,
customer-facing documentation, and features on time and to specification.
Soliciting input, communicating instructive material across the organization, and
working with architecture to consider the cross-team design challenges of various
implementations are crucial to the success of Senior Staff Applications
Engineers.</em></p>
<h4 style="padding: 0px;">Technical</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Focused on technical leadership, defining patterns, and
operational guidelines for their technologies(s).</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Independently scopes, designs, and delivers solutions for
large, complex epics.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Provides oversight, coaching, and guidance through code
and design reviews on multiple codebases within their area of expertise.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Anticipates technical challenges, exploring alternatives
and tradeoffs thoroughly.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Incredibly knowledgeable both inside and outside of the
company in their technology area and domain.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Has a deep understanding of the full stack encompassing
their relevant technologies.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Execution</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Plays a key role in defining the company's multi-year
tech strategy and roadmap within their area of expertise.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Plans and delivers complex, multi-team, cross-system,
long-term projects with external dependencies in order to satisfy specific business
goals.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Considers larger, long-term company goals and how the
future implications of design decisions between projects impact Medidata’s
customers and long-term vision.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Identifies problems that need to be solved and advocates
for their prioritization.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Drives one or more large, mission-critical systems at
Medidata or multiple complex, team level projects, overseeing all aspects from
design through implementation through operation.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Defines and communicates engineering standards and
processes.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Proactively drives conversations around and proposes
changes to Medidata's Standard Operating Procedures that affect the technology
organization.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Impact</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Routinely has group-wide impact and contributes
engineering-wide.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Contributes to external engineering brand.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Drives foundational work benefitting their technology
area and engineering overall.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Acts as a multiplier who shares knowledge and delegates
to help others grow.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Builds leaders within their team or technology space and
educates across spaces.
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Coaches and mentors senior applications engineers into
staff applications engineers.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Actively recruits strong and diverse engineers.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Thought leader for technical decisions, influencing
architecture and prioritization across multiple teams.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Leads initiatives across technology domains, even outside
of their core expertise.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Coordinates large and complex projects, including with
outside partners.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Leads by example and inspires others to create self-
managed teams.</li>
</ul>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<h2 style="padding: 0px;">Principal Engineer</h2>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><em>Principal Engineers are focused
on the company's long-term execution. They coach engineers across multiple
solutions, guiding leads on epics and managing integrated design components to
deliver on initiatives spanning multiple services, products, and solutions. They
are charged with driving the technical landscape of the company by defining
company-wide standards and communicating those standards inside and outside of the
company through teaching, trainings, literature, conferences, and technical talks.
Their success is closely tied to the success of the high-impact business
initiatives they complete.</em></p>
<h4 style="padding: 0px;">Technical</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Focused on highest impact, most critical, customer-facing
decisions and guidance, advancing Medidata technically and affecting business
success.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Respected leader and contributor across the
organization.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Primary expert in multiple areas of several solutions'
stack and deeply knowledgeable in several technology areas, such as Rails, SQL,
Java, C#/.NET, and javascript.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Is an expert on the company's platform, architecture, and
workflow.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Execution</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Plans, executes, and delivers large, complex projects
with interdependencies across teams and systems spanning months to years.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Creates a compelling technical vision with company-level
impact, anticipating future customer requirements.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Looked to as a model for balancing product and
engineering concerns.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Trusted with any critical project or initiative.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Owns capacity and growth of technical systems across
multiple technology areas, defining key metrics.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Offers technical talks inside and outside the company on
a variety of topics.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Impact</h4>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Has organization to industry-level impact in terms of
defining technical strategy and priorities, predicting and influencing shifting
customer requirements, and identifying business growth opportunities.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Builds leaders.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Educates across the organization.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Defines and models Medidata engineering brand, patterns,
and practices.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Works with the executive team on high level technical
guidance.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Serves as an ambassador for Medidata externally, drawing
engineers to the company.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Is a recognized leader within company and possibly also
the broader technical community.</li>
<li style="padding: 0px;">Leads complex initiatives with long-term strategic
value.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<h1 style="padding: 0px;">Terminology</h1>
<ul>
<li style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">A <strong>Solution</strong> is a
technology area in which teams at Medidata are organized. At other companies, these
might be called departments. Some examples of Medidata's solutions include
Platform, Balance, and Rave.</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p style="padding: 0px;">Special thanks to <a
href="https://levels.patreon.com/">Patreon</a> and others who have published their
engineering levels documents, which provided us with a framework for updating
ours.</p>
<p style="padding: 0px;"></p>
<p style="padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><em>This is a living document. It
will continue to grow and evolve based on feedback from you. Do not let it get
stale! If you see areas that should or should not be here, then please have a
discussion with your manager about requesting to update this guide. </em></p>
