Junior, mid or senior: how to tell what the role needs

Hiring a senior person for a mid-level job wastes money. Hiring a mid-level person for a senior job wastes months. The level a role needs is not about how important the work feels. It is about how much of the work the person has to figure out for themselves.

Here is how we define the levels:

Leadership roles such as tech lead and engineering manager run on longer bands.

What each level owns, for a full-stack developer

• Junior contributes on both sides without getting stuck. They work in a common stack, follow established patterns, and handle well-scoped features end to end.
• Mid takes a ticket from design to deployed. They integrate third parties, build internal tools, maintain production, and flag risk early.
• Senior owns the architecture end to end, including infrastructure. They can ship an entire product or major feature alone, and they mentor others and set the quality bar.

The same ladder for QA

• Junior runs test cases and regression before each release, and documents bugs clearly.
• Mid writes and maintains automation in Selenium, Playwright or Cypress, and owns testing for whole features or release cycles.
• Senior owns the coverage model, the automation framework and the quality gates. They move quality earlier, into the requirements.

Five questions that tell you which level a seat needs

1. Who sets the patterns? If nobody on the team has decided how things are built, you need someone who can: senior. If the patterns exist, mid or junior can work inside them.
2. How clear is the brief? Clear tickets suit junior. A clear goal with an unclear route suits mid. An unclear goal needs senior.
3. Who reviews their work? If nobody technical will review it, do not hire junior.
4. What does a bad decision cost? If one wrong call means a rewrite, you want the experience that avoids it.
5. What will the role look like in a year? Hire for the work you will have, not only the work you have today.

Getting it wrong, in both directions

• Too junior: the person waits for direction that nobody has time to give, and the work stalls quietly.
• Too senior: the person is bored by the scope, and leaves for a role that uses them.

Both are expensive. Neither is the person’s fault.

Our stance

We place junior, mid and senior people, and no level is the default. We quote the band for the level the seat needs. If a seat genuinely suits mid, we will tell you that rather than sell you senior.

All prices are per month, all-inclusive.

See every role and level on /pricing, or talk to us about the seat you are scoping.