The Full-Cycle Engineer
What it takes and how to become one
Slide contents
1. The Full-Cycle Engineer
What it takes and how to become one
2. Alexander Polomodov
Alexander Polomodov, Technical Director & Fellow, large fintech
Architecture and development processes
An organisation of about 1,000 people
20+ years in software
3. The loop regained missing properties
4. Roles share one delivery pipeline
5. Platforms split complexity in two
6. 01. After Senior, choose scale
Engineering management and individual contribution widen influence differently
7. IC and manager grow through influence
8. Five axes reveal the level
9. Growth brings a new disorder
10. Theorist and practitioner converge
11. A decision must outlive its author
12. Important work loses to urgency
Urgent
Important → do
Not important → delegate
Not urgent
Important → schedule
Not important → delete
13. A distant goal needs a near rhythm
Goal — Touches several areas of life
Plan — Creates rhythm and checkpoints
Step — Produces a visible artifact
14. Build an ambitious plan backwards
15. Engineers own the full cycle
16. Skill grows on real systems
Design production systems
Read architectures and postmortems
Solve architecture katas
Treat incidents as exercises
17. An SDE owns the whole system
Design before code
Quality inside the pipeline
Platforms reduce complexity
RFCs scale influence
Run closes the loop
Growth means greater scale and responsibility
18. Core material behind the talk
Cynefin framework
RFCs and Architecture Decision Records
Google SRE Book
Working Backwards
19. Thank you!
polomodov.tech
Slides, notes and links are on the site
Alexander Polomodov, Technical Director & Fellow, large fintech
@book_cube