The Senior Engineer I Didn't Notice I'd Become

I’ve been working with Claude for months on something I haven’t talked about much: undoing outdated stories about my career.

”I was on a team of two”

For eight years at my last company, when anyone asked about my role, I’d say I was on a team of two. That was technically accurate, there were two of us. But the way I said it always implied the same thing: my manager was in charge, and I just did what was assigned. The junior person, learning.

That framing was true the first year. I was new to financial services, new to the regulated environment, and had less than two years of experience running enterprise IT at any scale. I had a lot to learn, and so I did.

But from the start, I was given senior-level responsibilities and leadership tasks, which only increased over time. I just… didn’t internalize it as “me.”

How it actually went

I joined as an IT Analyst—the junior on a two-person team. The company had a mostly manual setup, a half-configured Jamf instance, ad-hoc onboarding, no formal security monitoring, no documentation culture. I came in to handle tickets and learn.

Over the next eight years, my role gradually transformed. Not because anyone formally handed me more responsibility, but because I kept picking up the work that no one else was doing, and making things better.

I rebuilt the Mac endpoint platform from scratch—Jamf Pro, Apple Business Manager, Jamf Protect, FileVault, zero-touch deployment, CIS benchmarks. I stood up the company’s security monitoring program in Sumo Logic with custom queries and Slack-integrated alerting tied to NYDFS compliance. I administered SSO and MFA across 20+ SaaS applications, handled migrations, scoped and executed projects.

By the end, I was the person other teams came to when they needed something built—if I hadn’t assessed their needs first. I was setting the technical direction for endpoint, identity, and security. My title went from Analyst to Associate to AVP, but the more meaningful shift was the one that wasn’t on the org chart. I went from doing what was assigned to me to deciding what needed to be done and doing it.

Why I kept telling the old story

I’ve been on a sabbatical, and just started my job search in earnest. When I’d describe a project, I’d say things like “we co-owned this” or “I co-led that.” Sometimes that was accurate. A lot of the time it wasn’t—I had total freedom on the work and was making the decisions independently. But “co-owned” felt safer to say. It matched the picture of the team that I’d internalized on day one.

I think there were two things going on.

One: I was annoyed. I was the one handling almost everything from “my personal yahoo account isn’t working on my ipad” to developing incident response protocols. I read that as being stuck doing the work while my manager did less. I now think a lot of what looked like under-engagement was just a manager doing what managers sometimes do: pushing the operational work down to free themselves up. That was never explicitly communicated to me, so I picked it up anyway and ran with it independently. But because the framing was never made explicit, I never updated my own story to match what was actually happening. I just stayed resentful that I was doing it alone, instead of noticing what it meant that I could.

Two: I was fixated on how the picture looked when I started. New person on a team of two, reporting up to an experienced manager. That identity stayed for years past its expiration date. I didn’t have a moment of formal promotion that forced me to update the picture. The picture just got more and more out of sync with reality, and I kept describing the old one.

A long detour to get here

It might help to back up. I didn’t grow up planning to work in IT, but technology was always around. My dad was an IT guy, and I grew up sharing his love of computers. It was just how I engaged with the world.

But I didn’t go straight into IT—I wanted to make the world a better place, so I studied education. I worked in classrooms, after school programs, and summer camps. The patience and empathy I built in those roles turned out to be one of my biggest assets in support, but at the time it was just my job.

When I eventually moved into desktop support—at a nonprofit in Cambridge—my manager was baffled by how much I already knew. But I’d been doing this my whole life, I’d just never put it on a resume.

I think this is part of why the senior-engineer shift later was so easy to miss. My whole relationship with technology had been informal. I was someone who picked things up and figured them out because that’s what I’d always done. There was no internal narrative that said “you are now doing professional senior-level work.” It just felt like the same thing I’d been doing in my dad’s house as a kid, with real-world consequences.

What changes when you actually see it

Naming what happened doesn’t change what I did. The endpoint platform is still the endpoint platform. The SIEM is still the SIEM. The IT department I built—the documentation, the self-service systems, the runbooks, the automated processes—outlasted my tenure there. The next person to come in didn’t inherit chaos; they inherited a working system. That’s the part I’m proudest of, and it was true whether or not I gave myself credit for it.

But the story you tell about yourself shapes the next thing you do. If you walk into an interview describing yourself as the junior person who was lucky to learn from a more senior manager, that’s the offer you’ll get. If you walk in describing what you actually did—set the technical direction for endpoint, identity, and security at a regulated firm; built systems that worked when no one was watching; rebuilt the IT culture from reactive into something proactive (I wrote about how, separately); trained your own replacement—that’s a different conversation.

I’m still recalibrating. I catch myself reaching for “co-led” when “led” is the honest word. I catch myself saying “team of two” in a way that flattens eight years into one. I’m trying to stop. Not to overclaim, but to actually describe the thing that happened.

The senior engineer was already there. I just hadn’t met her yet.