Staff/EM promotion readiness review with Ujwalendu Prakash

Book this if you're a Senior backend, platform, infra or SRE engineer who's been passed over, told "not yet" without specifics, or wants to know if the Staff vs EM fork is even the right one for you.

I sign off on Staff promotions and I write the calibration notes that get read in the room you're not in. Most promo cases I see don't fail on skill. They fail because the work was real and the evidence wasn't.

In 30 minutes I'll tell you which of those two is happening to you.

How it works

• Before the call, send me your promo doc, self-review, or just a list of what you've shipped in the last 12 months. Plus your company's leveling rubric if you have one
• 5 min — where you are, where you've been told you fall short, who your skip-level is
• 20 min — I read your evidence the way a calibration panel reads it. What clears the bar, what looks like Senior work described in Staff language, what scope you're missing entirely
• 5 min — the two or three specific things to change, and whether that's a one-quarter or three-quarter fix

What you leave with

A blunt read on your current level, and a short written summary within 48 hours: the gaps in priority order, and what to ask your manager for in your next 1:1 to close them.

What I'll probably tell you

That your impact is scoped to your team when it needs to be scoped to the org. That you're describing execution when the rubric is asking for judgment. That nobody outside your immediate group can name what you own. These are the three most common reasons a strong engineer sits at Senior for four years.

Don't book this if you want a resume rewrite or general career chat. This is one narrow question: are you promotable, and what's blocking it.