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This is what the role looks like in the vast majority of bigger tech companies, for good reason. Tech companies biggest hurdle is steering the boat. To launch anything you need to coordinate, align, and get consensus, beyond just your own team. Can engineerings develop in a vacuum? Can they take even well defined tickets, and build an optimal solution without knowing the product direction and vision? The manager is a people manager, not a product builder. Marketing, product, other engineering teams, all need to be aligned. As the most senior you're probably setting the high level architecture, so you're going to be the "API" or point of contact on which the other architects on other teams will need to communicate. Selling that architecture to juniors involves all those things mentioned, and as the architect you're responsible and the best person suited to judging their work as aligning with the vision/architecture. Senior role is usually defined and evaluated in performance reviews for the impact that goes beyond the code. I'm not explaining it super well, but its something you realize is a natural part of the role as an engineering leader. And that what a senior+ engineer is, a leader. Mid level engineer is a terminal role in a lot of companies for those who don't want the added responsibility. To your other point, there do exists teams where its all seniors who mostly do IC work. These are usually high-value, high-risk, core product engineering R&D. Or some kind of DX (Developer Experience) team where you are building tooling for other engineers, but even these teams too often has juniors, as at the end of the day, they are just another type of platform team |