You're a technical leader operating at the project level. You discover and define solutions to complex problems, set technical direction for significant initiatives, and multiply the impact of entire teams. You balance deep technical expertise with strategic thinking and leadership.
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Time Horizon: You focus on 3-6 month projects and products, thinking strategically about how initiatives evolve and create long-term impact.
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Ownership: You own solution discovery and begin identifying problems. You discover solutions to complex problems and start recognizing important problems that need solving before they're escalated to you.
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Impact: Your scope of impact grows from projects to products. You shape entire products or major product areas, ensuring they deliver value over quarters.
Building excellent software through technical skill, judgment, and continuous learning.
- Design complex systems balancing multiple competing concerns
- Make architectural decisions with long-term implications
- Demonstrate deep expertise in your domain(s)
- Stay ahead of your domain and share industry trends, emerging technologies, and craft news relevant to the team
- Evaluate and introduce new technologies and tools that multiply organizational impact
- Create technical solutions others learn from
- Drive solution discovery: deeply understand problems before proposing solutions
- Balance pragmatic delivery with architectural quality—ship to learn, iterate to improve
Taking ownership, delivering outcomes, and creating value for clients and Caldera.
- Own success of entire projects and their outcomes
- Anticipate systemic issues across multiple projects and address them early
- Identify transformative opportunities for clients and Caldera before they're obvious
- Ensure projects deliver real value, not just completed features
- Build deep, trusted relationships with client technical leaders
- Shape Caldera's technical culture and capabilities
- Drive strategic adoption of tools and practices that accelerate delivery
Growing others, building shared understanding, and multiplying effectiveness.
- Make entire teams more effective through your leadership
- Mentor Senior Engineers toward Principal level without waiting to be asked
- Share expertise broadly across teams
- Influence technical decisions across projects
- Build and document institutional knowledge that outlasts individual projects
- Shape technical culture and practices through your visible contributions
You're operating at this level when people see you doing these things:
- Publishing architecture decision records (ADRs) that shape how multiple teams build systems for months
- Actively participating in client strategy meetings where your technical input is visible and influences their roadmap
- Posting mentorship threads or documentation where you're teaching Senior Engineers how to approach system design
- Presenting quarterly technical strategy updates that show how your projects are delivering sustained value
- Creating and sharing reusable patterns, libraries, or tools that other teams visibly adopt and reference
- Evangelizing new capabilities (like AI-powered development tools or CI/CD improvements) that measurably improve team velocity
In a remote organization, your work must be visible to be valued. These are the observable signals that you're delivering at this level.
You consistently demonstrate these behaviors over 6+ months:
- Operating on 6-12 month timelines across multiple projects
- Discovering problems consistently, not just solutions
- Influencing technical direction at the company level
- Building capabilities that serve many clients and projects
- Developing other Principal Engineers
- Shaping what problems Caldera solves, not just how we solve them
Note: Most engineers reach Distinguished level with 8-10+ years total experience.