Avoiding Downleveling

What is downleveling?

Downleveling is when you get a job offer below the level you’re targeting. For example, you aim for a staff-level role, and you get a senior offer. Or, you expect a mid-level offer, and you get a junior offer.

Here's the reality: companies downlevel candidates when they think they can get away with it. That signal is often the sum of small microsignals that accumulate throughout the interview loop.

At Tier-1 companies—especially in tough markets—downleveling is actually more likely than getting an offer at your target level.

Key terms to know

Throughout the lessons, we use a few shorthand terms to keep things concise:

• L-1: An offer one level below your target level
• L-2: An offer two levels below your target level
• BATNA: Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. In other words, your fallback option if you don’t accept an offer. The stronger your BATNA, the more leverage you have.

How to avoid downlevel offers

Downleveling is costly—often $100K+ per year—and can leave you stuck at a level that doesn’t match your skills. The solution? Build good habits that signal seniority in interviews, so you get offers at the level you deserve.

Bonus: Using these skills can also help in performance reviews and promotion conversations.

What’s the true cost of downleveling?

The difference between your target level and an L-1 role can be greater than $100K annually. At Google, the average delta between senior and staff engineers is $183K per year.

While downlevel offers are often pitched as a fast track to promotion, the reality is different. The underlying message is how quickly you can get promoted, but what’s more common is candidates that take lower-level offers languish (sometimes for several years) until they jump ship, rarely getting promoted to their target level.

When and why downleveling happens

When: Quite literally, you learn you’ve been downleveled at the offer stage, even though you’ve been sending microsignals about your level throughout the entire interview process, including interactions with your recruiter.

Why: Simply put, downleveling happens because you convey a smaller level of impact than your interviewers expect for your desired level. In other words, if all of your stories make you sound like a senior-level engineer, you won't get a staff-level offer.

Companies downlevel to hedge against a false positive (a “bad hire”).

Deeper reasons behind downleveling

Beyond your interview performance, other structural factors often drive downleveling (and are out of your control):

• Market factors
• Company strategy
• Larger than usual information asymmetry

Market factors

Simply put, when times get tough in the economy or market at large, more downlevels happen because the power shifts to employers.

Company strategy

Some companies (like Google and Meta) are notorious for downleveling, even in candidate-friendly markets. In tougher (employer-driven markets) they double down on downleveling. According to a recent survey, more than half of Meta software engineering candidates who receive an offer get downleveled. Google also seems to downlevel at a similar clip. Many tech companies tend to copy the industry leaders because… unfortunately, it works.

Many candidates accept downlevel offers all the time. Sometimes for good reason, but often because they feel pressured to to wrap things up without realizing they had leverage to push back.

And it's not just L-1 or L-2 downlevels. Google will offer a director of engineering (of a sizable startup) a new grad engineering role, and because it’s Google, the former director will accept. All the FAANG companies know that desperate candidates will accept less-than-ideal offers. The FAANG brand carries so much weight that candidates don’t have to be that desperate to give in and accept downlevel offers.

Larger than usual information asymmetry

When there’s significant information asymmetry, companies hold a bigger advantage, and they know it. If you lack competing offers or signal that you’re stuck (at your current job), you convey a weak BATNA, making you an easy downlevel target.

For example, a few senior Twitter engineers post-Elon-acquisition were downleveled, not necessarily due to lack of skill. The suspicion was that they were downleveled partly because they still worked at Twitter and had no competing offers. If you recall the news cycle on Elon-run Twitter, you’ll know that the companies extending these offers knew these candidates were desperate: they knew their BATNAs were weak.

Anecdotally, it seems that companies are slightly more likely to downlevel engineers who:

• Seem “too nice”
• Come from non-traditional backgrounds
• Come from international markets or are on visas

Why? Companies can view these candidates as having weaker BATNAs or having lower leverage to explore.

Driving the point home with another real example

I worked with a super senior engineer who got downleveled with a staff level (L6) offer from Google; it was an L-1 offer.

He didn’t respond to the offer for two weeks.

Without any pushback or explanation, the Google recruiter came back and sent him a new senior staff (L7) offer.

What’s the lesson here? Is it to ghost recruiters for two weeks to play hardball? Not exactly. Certainly there’s some value to negotiating from a position of strength, and this includes extending time where possible. The bigger lesson is:

If you come across as someone who can be pushed around, you’re more likely to be. If you project confidence and boundaries, you’re more likely to get what you want.

Downleveling isn’t standardized

Levels are not standardized across tech companies. For example, a staff engineer at Google is not the same at a small startup. It's difficult to accurately assess the level of any engineer.

Sometimes downleveling is fair. Other times, it’s wrong. The key is to stay ambitious about your target level, yet realistic. If you were a C-suite exec at a startup, that doesn’t guarantee you’re ready for an executive role at Google.

Many assume that negotiation begins after you get an offer, but in reality, the entire tech interview process is a negotiation. Downleveling is simply an aggressive negotiation tactic, by companies.

Expected impact by level

Let’s dive into more about the levels. Use this chart to see expected impact by level.

Here are a few engineering role examples:

Compare downlevel and target-level impact (by role)

Before diving into examples, remember:

Impact is not just dollars and sense. It’s also scope (how many teams/engineers are affected) and complexity (business, technical, and organizational).

To convey the right scope, consider:

• How many engineers did you influence or lead (mentoring, growing their skillset)?
• What level of stakeholders did you work with or push back to?
• How broad was the impact of your documentation, processes, software, automations, architecture?

Feature-level impact (junior engineer)

❌ Downlevel example

• Impact: I fixed a double-click bug on the Checkout button, reducing daily support tickets.
• Scope: Affected one React component and one API endpoint; no team coordination needed.

✅ Target-level example

• Impact: I fixed the bug and turned the solution into a reusable React hook, published in our shared UI library, and cutting cart abandonment by 25% (approximately $50K/month).
• Scope: Adopted across 8 product teams.

Problem-level impact (mid-level engineer)

❌ Downlevel example

• Impact: I fixed a memory leak in an image-processing service, stopping a CPU crash loop.

• Scope: The patch applied only to our media service within my squad.

✅ Target-level example

• Impact: After the patch, I created a lightweight sidecar and Prometheus alert template to flag similar memory leaks, preventing three Sev-2 incidents.

• Scope: Now deployed across five microservices.

Team-level impact (senior-level engineer)

❌ Downlevel example

• Impact: I led a four-person migration from a monolithic to sharded PostgreSQL on AWS RDS, cutting 50% off p95 query latency.

• Scope: Benefited only one service and its direct consumers.

✅ Target-level example

• Impact: Beyond halving latency, I scripted a zero-downtime shard-move tool, wrote a design doc, and ran two internal workshops. That toolkit accelerated downstream migrations and helped unblock five product launches worth $3M in annual revenue.

• Scope: The toolkit is now used by approximately 40 engineers across three adjacent squads.

Org-level impact (staff-level engineer)

��� Downlevel example

• Impact: I swapped our flaky Jenkins jobs with GitHub Actions, cutting build time from 18–7 minutes, and unblocking daily deployments.

• Scope: The new pipeline served only the services of our eight-person team.

✅ Target-level example

• Impact: After proving the time savings, I authored a set of reusable, standardized GitHub Actions templates (linting, unit tests, container builds, blue-green deploys), reducing build time by 60%, and slashing failed deploy rollbacks by 40% across the org.

• Scope: Now used by approximately 85 engineers across six teams, spanning three business units that can now ship through the standardized pipeline. I maintain the central workflow repo and host a monthly CI/CD office hours to guide future enhancements.

Company-level impact (principal-level engineer)

❌ Downlevel example

• Impact: I suggested switching our global CDN from one vendor to another for better edge coverage.

• Scope: The idea remained in a small leadership thread and never moved past discussion.

✅ Target-level example

• Impact: I led a multi-cloud CDN evaluation and built a traffic-cost model that convinced the CTO to adopt a dual-vendor edge strategy, shaving 30ms off worldwide, start-play latency, saving $6M annually.

• Scope: The new policy now sets deployment standards for 150+ engineers, and is now referenced in every vendor contract and board-level technology brief.

For senior+ engineers

Coding isn’t the main reason why you'll get downleveled. While leveling signals show up throughout the process, the most significant signals are conveyed in the system design and behavioral rounds.

Compare the most common reason for downleveling in those rounds:

In system design rounds, the most common feedback is: “Their knowledge wasn’t deep enough.” This usually surfaces during the deep dive portion of a system design interview. Preventing downleveling in technical rounds isn’t in the scope of this course, however, we’ll briefly touch on a few tactics to help in system design rounds later in this lesson.

In behavioral rounds, it’s similarly vague: “The scope of their projects isn’t what we expect for this level.” Often, the actual scope is sufficient, but poorly conveyed, where it came across as too small. Other times, the scope is on the fence, and a few microsignals push them onto one side of the fence.

Bottom line: Most downlevels aren’t dramatic. They’re close calls simply caused by how you present yourself in high-signal rounds.

Common mistakes that lead to downleveling

Dealbreaker: Conveying a lower impact than what’s expected from your target level

If the overall impact of your past projects sounds too small for the level you’re aiming for, you’re instantly getting downleveled.

Once you commit this error, it’s nearly impossible to reverse yourself from this spot.

Common mistake #1: Not clarifying level early on

Don’t go into a technical or hiring manager interview without knowing the level you’re being considered for. Before the interview, ask the recruiter upfront: “What level is this role scoped for?”

Almost every company uses levels, even if a few, (like Jane Street) don’t. Getting this out of the way earlier in the process is better.

Common mistake #2: Refusing to say “I don’t know”

In system design deep dives, refusing to say “I don’t know” can hurt your credibility. Surprisingly, top candidates say it the most. It’s a time-management tactic that invites hints or shifts the conversation away from your weaknesses.

Imagine you’re a system design interviewer who's an expert on Kafka. Candidate A includes Kafka in their design, but dodges a follow-up question about Kafka. So you dig in further, continue to get vague answers, and waste valuable time probing an area that the candidate would never show signal on.

Candidate B also uses Kafka in their design, yet in response to your follow-up question about Kafka, they admit that they don’t know. They say, “I’m not sure! I’m definitely going to look this up after the interview, but for now, I’ll say [Guess] based on [Rationale].”

They saved you time, avoided your grilling, and scored humility points for admitting they were at the bounds of their knowledge.

Bottom line: Knowing when and how to say “I don’t know” is a high-signal skill—not a weakness.

Microsignals that move you towards your target level

In the movie, Any Given Sunday, Al Pacino said, "the margin of difference between scoring a touchdown and barely missing is only inches."

Those inches aren’t much on their own, but when compounded, they often decide who wins and loses. You can think of downlevels the way Al Pacino views football—it's a game of inches.

Small wins that add up

Here are some tactics to score those cumulative inches—and beat the game.

Green Flag #1: Look up the background of your interviewer

Knowing your interviewer’s domain helps you anticipate where they’ll probe. Backend engineers may focus on scalability, API design, concurrency, etc. while frontend engineers may focus more on performance, JavaScript, etc.

Green Flag #2: Understand the company’s tech stack.

For example, if you interview at LinkedIn, and they ask you about Kafka… Well, LinkedIn developed Kafka. Their interviewers can expect more from candidates who bring up Kafka. At companies known for specific tech, the way you talk about that specific tech can score (or detract) many points.

Green Flag #3: Casually mention name brands (if applicable)

If you went to a prestigious school or worked at a top company, you can casually mention that detail, but don’t dwell on it. Say it so casually, as if it's no more significant than “My day’s going well.” Don’t elaborate, say it like it’s no big deal, like: “After Google, I went to Netflix, and now I’m at Anthropic.”

Green Flag #4: State your level early

The first time you talk to any interviewer (hiring manager, recruiter, skip, or peer), it’s a good idea to include your target level. For example, if you’re aiming for the principal level, open your interview with “I’m a principal engineer...” The most natural place for this is in the first line of your personal pitch. This helps set expectations.

Green Flag #5: Be strategic about offer details

If you get competing offers at L-1, don’t share that level with other companies. You can mention that you got an offer, but don’t mention the level of the offer. The converse is also true: if you get an offer at your desired level (or even L+1), do share that with other companies.

Green Flag #6: Mock interview with the right people

The highest value add is a mock interview specifically with an engineer who interviews for your target level at your target company for your target role. While not everyone can afford mock interviews with engineers from name-brand companies, you can find some relevant coaches in our coaching platform, and even more in our members-only Slack community.

Key takeaways

Downleveling hurts. Proactively prevent it by avoiding common pitfalls, stacking green flags, and practicing (ideally with a trusted partner) until your stories are bulletproof.