A Day in the Life: What Does an L1, L2, L3, and L4 Engineer Actually Do?
In our previous career guides, we discussed the massive salaries software engineers can command. But a big paycheck comes with real responsibilities.
If you are wondering, "is full stack a good job?", you need to look past the money and ask yourself if you actually want to do the daily work. Are developers just sitting in a dark room typing code for 9 hours straight?
Not at all. A developer’s day is a mix of logic puzzles, team collaboration, and system design. To give you a realistic picture, here is exactly what is L1, L2, L3, and L4 engineer doing on a typical Tuesday in a Bangalore tech park.
The Builders: L1 & L2 Developers
⚙️ L1: Junior Developer
Typical Day: 80% Coding / 20% Meetings
- 10:00 AM: Attend the "Daily Standup" meeting to report what you did yesterday.
- 11:00 AM: Pick up a small "ticket" (a task) like changing the color of a button or fixing a minor typo on the React frontend.
- 2:00 PM: Get stuck on a Git merge conflict. Ask an L2 developer for help.
- 4:00 PM: Submit your code for a "Pull Request" (PR) so senior devs can review it.
🚀 L2: Mid-Level Developer
Typical Day: 60% Coding / 40% Review & Planning
- 10:30 AM: Start building a complete feature (e.g., adding a new payment gateway using Node.js and Razorpay).
- 1:00 PM: Review the code submitted by L1 developers. Leave comments on how they can improve their syntax.
- 3:30 PM: Meet with the Product Manager to discuss why a specific feature might take 3 days instead of 1.
- 5:00 PM: Successfully push your payment feature to the testing environment.
The Architects: L3, L4, and Beyond
As you move up the ladder, you actually write *less* code. Your job shifts from "building the house" to "drawing the blueprints."
L3: Senior Developer
50% Coding / 50% Architecture
You tackle the hardest bugs that no one else can fix. If the database is running slow, it's your job to optimize the MongoDB queries. You spend half your day mentoring L1s and L2s, ensuring the team's overall code quality remains high.
L4: Staff Engineer
20% Coding / 80% Strategy
You rarely write standard feature code. You design the infrastructure. Should the company switch from AWS to Google Cloud? Should they use a Microservices architecture? You spend your day in high-level meetings making decisions that affect the whole engineering department.
Who are L5 Engineers?
If you see discussions about who are L5 engineers (Principal Engineers), these are the visionaries. There might only be one L5 engineer for every 100 developers. They dictate the technological vision of the entire company for the next 3 to 5 years. They are industry experts, often speaking at conferences and writing the open-source tools that other companies use.