Description
Develops expertise in foundational systems, such as deployments, pipelines, databases and machine learning
A strong infrastructure provides a solid and stable foundation on which to build great products. Organizational excellence here lets us deploy rapidly with confidence, and be robust to systems failure. Engineers with strong database or machine learning skills give us the ability to model and process data in ways that allow us to deliver great experiences to our users.
Milestone 1
(adds 1 mile to your journey)
Works effectively within established structures, following current best practices
| Examples | |
|---|---|
| Writes thorough postmortems for service outages | Made safe and effective Ansible changes |
| Makes simple configuration changes to services | Implemented new ETL pipelines based on existing ones |
| Performs backfills safely and effectively, without causing pages | Resolved out of disk errors independently |
Milestone 2
(adds 3 miles to your journey)
Develops new instances of existing architecture, or minor improvements to existing architecture
| Examples | |
|---|---|
| Made minor version upgrades to technologies | Upgraded NodeJS from 8.0 to 8.1.1 |
| Builds machine learning jobs within the ML framework | Built custom packages for RPMs |
| Triages service issues correctly and independently | Upgraded ETL efficiency by improving Dynamo to S3 loading |
Milestone 3
(adds 6 miles to your journey)
Designs standalone systems of moderate complexity, or major new features in existing systems
| Examples | |
|---|---|
| Acts as primary maintainer for existing critical systems | Designed Ansible configuration management |
| Designs moderately complex systems | Built Medium's realtime stats pipeline |
| Makes major version upgrades to libraries | Designed flexible framework for writing machine learning jobs |
Milestone 4
(adds 12 miles to your journey)
Builds complex, reusable architectures that pioneer best practices for other engineers, or multi-system services
| Examples | |
|---|---|
| Designs complex projects that encompass multiple systems and technologies | Designed and built BBFD |
| Demonstrates deep knowledge of foundational systems | Designed AWS configuration management |
| Introduces new databases and technologies to meet underserved needs | Introduced Kinesis and pioneered streaming events pipeline |
Milestone 5
(adds 20 miles to your journey)
Is an industry-leading expert in foundational engineering or sets strategic foundational direction for an eng team
| Examples | |
|---|---|
| Designs transformational projects in service of long-term goals | Invented a novel ML technique that advanced the state of the art |
| Defines the strategic vision for foundational work and supporting technologies | Defined and developed Medium's continuous delivery strategy |
| Invents industry-leading techniques to solve complex problems | Developed and implemented HA strategy |
Configuration Health
- ✅ Associated with 1 role
- ⚠️ Has been referenced in no observations
- ℹ️ No one has achieved a milestone on this ability
- ⛔️ Last updated: almost 5 years ago
- ℹ️ Never conversed about
Role & Position Requirements
- Buildersare recommended to be milestone 1+
Examples / Observations
An observation relating to Foundations has not been publicly recognized yet.
Conversations about Foundations
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