You’ve spent the past 7 to 10 years mastering the complexities of engineering, earning the trust of your peers, and becoming a go-to mentor for others. Yet, as you stand at this pivotal stage of your career, you might be wondering: What’s next?
In this article, we’ll explore the different career paths available to senior engineers, practical strategies to help you grow, and common pitfalls to avoid as you navigate the next chapter of your professional journey.
Paths to Advance Your Career
As a senior engineer, there’s no single route to career growth. Depending on your strengths, interests, and aspirations, you can choose from several rewarding paths to continue advancing your impact and skills. Exploring a career beyond a senior software engineer means identifying roles that align with your goals, whether you prefer deep technical expertise, leadership, or customer-focused positions.
Let’s explore the most common options.
The Individual Contributor Path
This is the most common path for engineers who are heavily interested in being hands-on in improving a system architecture's, maintainability and keeping the technology stack up to date.
In this role you’re responsible for setting coding standards and enforcing them, often dealing with architecture decisions that impact a codebase for years to come like what database to use for a new project. You may think this role is solitary but it couldn’t be further from the truth. To align a team you will need to have clear written and oral communication on how to improve the system and be able to find agreement in the team on how to get there.
Your main responsibility is to make the engineers more efficient, whether by training them or finding ways to save time. For example, you might improve the CI pipelines so that 20 engineers each wait 5 minutes less on their merge or pull requests.
Perks of this path:
- Staying deeply involved in technical problem-solving and cutting-edge technology.
- Having a direct impact on the technical direction of the organization.
- Enjoying the satisfaction of improving workflows for the entire engineering team.
Challenges of this path:
- Managing technical debt.
- Convincing the team or leadership to adopt new approaches or tools.
- Balancing the long-term technical vision with immediate technical needs.
The People Management Path
The other common path for engineers is to manage other engineers. This role also entails that you manage expectations of the projects of the team, mentor actively focusing on each person's needs, and manage the team workload.
This role is often seen as hands-off from the code, but realistically, a good engineering manager allocates time to work alongside individual contributors. They also pair work with junior engineers to help them organize their code, manage their time, and hone their skills.
In this role you actively communicate with project managers, marketing, sales, and operational teams like support to improve the quality of the communication with engineers, and agree on realistic expectations for deliverables. Your main responsibility is to help promote your team members so they have the tools to become individual contributors or people managers such as yourself.
Perks of this path:
- Influencing the career growth and satisfaction of team members.
- Having a say in high-level organizational decisions.
- Building a strong team culture centered on collaboration.
Challenges of this path:
- Dealing with interpersonal conflicts and diverse team dynamics.
- Navigating the pressure of delivering results while supporting individual team member growth.
The Product Management Path
While not as common of a path for a senior engineer, you can become a powerhouse of a product manager with your engineering analytical skills and knowledge of the codebase. You have the advantage when it comes to estimations and the capacity to communicate with the lingo engineers use daily.
This option moves you further away from coding and introduces new challenges. Your main responsibility is to ensure feature requests from marketing, engineering, and sales align with product goals and are financially sound. You will analyze how customers use the application, learn from their feedback, and find ways to improve their experience with quality-of-life features.
Perks of this path:
- Leveraging your technical expertise in a strategic, customer-focused role.
- Influencing the product’s trajectory and overall success.
- Gaining a holistic view of the business by working closely with cross-functional teams.
Challenges of this path:
- Being farther removed from day-to-day coding and technical decision-making.
- Managing conflicting priorities from stakeholders.
- Balancing technical feasibility with business needs and customer demands.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
As you progress in your career, there are certain pitfalls that can hinder your growth, regardless of the path you choose. Being aware of these challenges will help you navigate them effectively and continue to thrive as a senior engineer.
Overlooking Leadership Skills
Regardless of the path you take, being code- or people-oriented, you need to actively work on how to communicate with different people, how to best get your point across, and how to motivate team members during times when they don’t feel productive. It doesn’t matter if you’re the best engineer in the room if you’re unable to multiply yourself by sharing knowledge with the team and elevating their skills to the next level.
Balancing technical expertise with leadership is critical in this phase of your career. You must excel in your domain, guide your team in understanding complex technical concepts, and ensure they can execute them effectively. Leadership involves guiding and inspiring others to perform at their best rather than trying to do everything on your own.
Your impact is limited as an individual; you might go fast, but a team you train well will go further. Leadership skills are essential for any career path, and developing them begins with active listening. Asking questions to understand others' perspectives will help you give clear and constructive feedback, which is a key leadership trait.
Active listening is the first step, followed by practicing empathy—recognizing that everyone has unique challenges, motivations, and ways of working. Showing understanding during unproductive periods will improve your leadership skills and help your team regain focus.
Once you have these, you only need to lead by example by staying humble and open to feedback and of course, never stop learning.
Struggling to Delegate Effectively
As your seniority increases the complexity of the work people rely on you to do also increases. To avoid that you need to work 16-hour days, not only do you require time management and setting realistic expectations with stakeholders, but you also need to be able to “let go” of parts of your work.
Use these opportunities to help your team grow. A simple task for you can be a valuable challenge for a junior engineer or a senior unfamiliar with the topic. They may be slower, ask many questions, and make mistakes, just as you did at their level. Be patient and delegate tasks, which will allow you to focus on more complex challenges that impact more engineers and customers.
In order to get better at delegating, you can start by practicing choosing the right person for a particular task while setting clear expectations for it, such as a clear definition of the task, its goals and deadlines, or any other constraints or priorities. When defining the tasks, it’s important to provide context which means explaining why the task is important and how it fits into the bigger picture. This also includes sharing background information or resources to set the task and the assignee up for success.
As a delegator, you need to be patient and available. Expect questions and mistakes, especially during learning opportunities, and offer support when needed. At the same time, encourage them to attempt solving the problem independently first.
Finally, at the end of a task, it’s nice to reflect, which will give you insights into how it went and what you can adjust for the next delegation of tasks.
Techniques to Grow
Find a Mentor
When people recommend that you find a mentor a question that can arise is, “But how and where can I find one?” If you work in a company there’s likely someone in the role that you imagine yourself to be in someday, being an individual contributor, people manager, or other role.
Reach out to those people and ask for 15-30 minutes of their time every couple of weeks so that you ask them questions, shadow their work, pair work on a problem, and with that, learn from them. You will find that most people are happy to give a portion of their time to help you progress.
If you work alone, are the most senior at your company, or were refused the mentorship session by your peers there are always books, videos, or articles from people who were once in your position and have documented what they did to grow.
Additionally, you can find mentors outside of your company. You can look for mentorship by involving yourself in professional communities, attending industry meetups - be it online or in-person, as well as searching for them on professional social media like LinkedIn.
Be the Mentor
After reading countless books or having multiple sessions with a mentor, solidify your knowledge by being a mentor to others. If nobody has ever reached out to you to mentor them you can get it started by offering to pair work when you see a peer who is struggling with a topic that you believe you can help them with. Your help will be appreciated, and the peer will ask questions that you never thought about, forcing you to learn and grow.
When done consistently, people will recognize that they can rely on you for help. Offer 15-30 minute sessions where they can ask questions and pair work on topics they are curious about.
Choosing Your Path and Leading with Purpose
Although the roles of individual contributors and people managers may seem entirely different, they share a common need for leadership that emphasizes others' growth. A significant part of this growth comes from delegating tasks and actively mentoring.
Choosing which of the paths to grow into can be a challenging part so try both paths and see which one you prefer as no rule states that once you’re a manager or an individual contributor you always have to be one. It’s important to listen actively and create a safe space for your peers to grow so that you can delegate and focus on your growth. Along the process, have fun!
