I Lead Engineers in Nigeria. In Big Tech, I’d Probably Be an L3. And That Should Scare Us.

This isn’t false humility.

It’s engineering honesty.

I currently lead engineers.

I review infrastructure decisions.
I touch production.
I make cloud architecture calls.
I own delivery.
I mentor people.
I’ve sat in rooms where “senior,” “lead,” and “architect” were attached to my name.

But the more I study how engineering works at places like Google, Amazon, Meta, or even strong platform-first startups…

The more I realize something uncomfortable:

By global engineering standards, I might still be early.

Maybe L3. Maybe L4 on a good day.

And that’s not self-doubt.

That’s context.

Because in many parts of Nigeria, engineering titles often scale faster than engineering systems.

You can become “Lead Engineer” without ever seeing:

Real Incident Management

Not “the app is down, check logs.”

I mean:

• Severity classification (SEV1, SEV2, SEV3)

• Dedicated incident commander roles

• War rooms

• Timeline capture

• Customer impact tracking

• Blameless postmortems

• Action item ownership after outages

A lot of teams still treat outages as panic events.

Not engineering systems.

Real Platform Engineering

Not:

“DevOps guy, please help deploy.”

I mean:

• Golden paths

• Internal developer platforms

• Self-service environments

• Standardized CI/CD templates

• Policy as code

• Infrastructure guardrails

• Developer experience metrics

Many startups still depend on one “cloud guy.”

That’s not platform engineering.

That’s operational dependency.

Real Scale Testing

Many engineers become “senior” without ever asking:

• What happens at 10x traffic?

• Where does latency spike?

• What’s our p95 or p99?

• How does our system behave under partial failure?

• What happens when Redis dies?

• What happens when an availability zone fails?

No chaos engineering.

No game days.

No resilience drills.

Just production and vibes.

Real Observability

Not:

kubectl logs

I mean:

• Distributed tracing

• Metrics correlation

• SLOs / SLIs

• Error budgets

• Alert fatigue reduction

• Service dependency mapping

Many teams only become “observability-focused” after production pain.

That’s not engineering maturity.

That’s reactive survival.

Real Security Culture

Not:

“We’ll fix auth later.”

I mean:

• Threat modeling

• Secret rotation

• IAM least privilege

• Dependency scanning

• Supply chain security

• Runtime detection

• Audit trails

Security is still treated like compliance in too many places.

Not architecture.

So yes.

I lead engineers here.

But in stronger engineering cultures?

I’d probably still be learning under someone better.

And that’s not depressing.

That’s motivating.

Because I’m not chasing Nigerian titles.

I’m chasing engineering systems that scale beyond geography.

And until more startups in Africa stop confusing ownership with maturity…

We’ll keep producing “senior engineers”…

Who have never worked inside truly senior engineering systems.