Hey, Prasad here 👋 I’m the voice behind the weekly newsletter “Big Tech Careers.”
This week I bring you another guest post from Vamsi Narla, Founder, Revarta and ex-Director Engineering and Product, Remitly
Vamsi has conducted over 1,000 interviews across all levels over the last decade and is going to share how to avoid getting down-leveled during interviews.
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Introduction to This 2-Part Series
Getting down-leveled during an interview costs professionals hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings over their careers.
This two-part deep dive breaks down exactly why down-leveling happens and how to prevent it:
Part 1 focuses on understanding the problem.
Why different companies evaluate experience differently, what mental models interviewers use, and how the translation challenge creates the down-leveling trap.
Part 2 covers the solution.
Strategic positioning techniques, practical preparation strategies, and deliberate practice methods to ensure you communicate your true level in any company’s context.
If you’ve ever felt misunderstood in an interview or suspected you were underleveled, this series will change how you approach interviews.
A talented senior engineer interviews at a new company. They’ve led complex projects. They’ve made critical technical decisions. They have years of solid experience.
The offer comes back: one level below what they applied for.
They didn’t lack skills. They didn’t perform poorly. But they couldn’t translate their experience into the new company’s context. They couldn’t demonstrate their level in a way that mapped to how this company thinks about scale, scope, and seniority.
The cost?
→ Often $80K-150K per year in compensation. Over a career, that’s hundreds of thousands—sometimes over a million—in lost earnings.
→ Years lost in getting back to their deserved career level
Down-leveling isn’t about being underqualified. It’s about failing to communicate your qualifications in the interviewer’s language.
Why Down-Leveling Happens: The Translation Problem
Here’s what most people miss about interviews:
Every company has different mental models for what “senior” means.
At Google, “senior” might mean you’ve scaled systems to 100M+ users. At a startup, it might mean you’ve built 0→1 products. At Amazon, it means demonstrating leadership principles through specific behavioral examples.
You’ve done senior-level work. But if you can’t translate that work into the mental model of the company you’re interviewing with, you sound junior—even when you’re not.
The Experience Translation Challenge
I interviewed candidates at Remitly who came from companies with completely different contexts:
Candidate A worked at a large enterprise with 50-person teams and year-long release cycles. They led significant initiatives, but when asked about pace and autonomy, their examples felt slow and over-managed.
Candidate B worked at a scrappy startup with 3-person teams and daily deploys. They had tons of autonomy, but when asked about scale and process, their examples felt small and chaotic.
Both were qualified. Both had done senior-level work in their contexts. But neither could effectively translate their experience to Remitly’s context: 10-20 person teams, weekly releases, millions of users, growth-stage challenges.
The candidates who avoided down-leveling weren’t necessarily more experienced. They were better at positioning their experience in our mental model.
The Three Dimensions Companies Evaluate Differently
When companies assess your level, they’re looking at three things. But each company weights them differently and defines them differently:
1. Scope and Impact
What they’re assessing:
How big was the problem you solved?
How many users/customers were affected?
What was the business impact?
What scale were you operating at?
Why it varies by company:
A 100K user feature at a startup might be their entire user base
A 100K user feature at Google is a rounding error
$1M revenue impact at a Series A is huge
$1M revenue impact at Amazon is invisible
The translation challenge:
If you say “I led a project that affected 50,000 users,” different companies hear different things:
Startup: “Wow, that’s bigger than our whole company”
Mid-size: “That’s significant, about 10% of our base”
Large tech: “That’s pretty small, barely noticeable”
The down-leveling trap: You share your scope using your old company’s metrics. The interviewer evaluates it using their company’s scale. The numbers don’t translate, so you sound junior.
2. Technical Depth and Complexity
What they’re assessing:
How technically challenging was the problem?
What trade-offs did you navigate?
What expertise did you demonstrate?
How did you handle ambiguity?
Why it varies by company:
Startup complexity: building fast with limited resources, making do with imperfect solutions
Enterprise complexity: navigating legacy systems, coordinating across many teams, managing technical debt
Hyperscale complexity: performance at scale, distributed systems, reliability under extreme load
The translation challenge:
Your hardest technical problem might not sound hard to them because they face different technical challenges.
You: “I optimized our database queries and reduced load time from 2 seconds to 200ms.”
Startup: “Nice optimization, that’s good work.”
Hyperscale company: “Why was it 2 seconds in the first place? We operate at microsecond latency.”
The down-leveling trap: You explain complexity using your old company’s constraints. They evaluate it against their challenges. It doesn’t sound that complex, so you sound junior.
3. Leadership and Influence
What they’re assessing:
Who did you influence?
How did you drive decisions?
What teams did you work across?
How did you handle disagreement?
Why it varies by company:
Small company: direct communication, informal processes, everyone knows everyone
Large company: influencing through documentation, formal processes, navigating bureaucracy
Some companies: leadership through code and technical decisions
Other companies: leadership through people management and organizational influence
The translation challenge:
How you demonstrated leadership at your old company might not match how they think about leadership.
You: “I drove alignment across engineering and product on the technical direction.”
Flat startup: “Okay, but that’s just normal collaboration here.”
Large enterprise: “How did you do that without a formal leadership role?”
The down-leveling trap: You describe leadership using your old company’s structure. They evaluate it against their expectations. It doesn’t sound like leadership to them, so you sound junior.
The Narrative Positioning Problem
Beyond translation, there’s a deeper issue: how you position your experience in the overall narrative.
Most people structure their interview answers like a chronological report:
“Here’s what happened”
“Here’s what I did”
“Here’s what resulted”
But down-leveling happens when interviewers can’t quickly map your experience to their mental model of seniority.
What Strong Positioning Looks Like
When you position effectively, you’re actively helping the interviewer understand your level:
Weak positioning: “I worked on improving our payment system. We had some issues with failures, so I investigated and implemented a retry mechanism. It reduced failures by 40%.”
What the interviewer hears: “Okay, so you fixed a problem. Sounds like solid individual contributor work.”
Strong positioning: “Our payment system was failing for 5% of transactions—roughly $2M in lost revenue annually across 500K customers. As the tech lead, I drove the investigation across three teams, identified the root causes, and designed a resilient retry architecture. I influenced the product roadmap to prioritize this, coordinated the rollout to minimize risk, and mentored two junior engineers through the implementation. We reduced failures to under 0.5% and recovered $1.8M in annual revenue.”
What the interviewer hears: “Okay, they understand business impact (revenue), they led across teams (scope), they made technical decisions (depth), and they influenced without direct authority (leadership). That’s senior.”
The difference isn’t the work you did. It’s how you positioned it.
The first version is a report. The second is a story that actively demonstrates scope, complexity, and leadership—in language that transfers across companies.
What’s Next in Part 2
Now that you understand why down-leveling happens and how the translation problem creates the trap, Part 2 will show you exactly how to fix it.
In Part 2, we’ll cover:
Strategic positioning techniques that map your experience to any company’s mental model
Three concrete positioning formulas you can apply to every story
Preparation strategies that start before you even enter the interview room
The practice method that makes positioning automatic under pressure
Real cost analysis showing exactly how much down-leveling can cost you
Feedback systems that close the gap between what you think you’re communicating and what interviewers actually hear
The candidates who avoid down-leveling don’t just have great experience. They know how to translate it. And that’s a learnable skill.
Thanks for reading Big Tech Careers! Subscribe to receive Part 2 article of this series directly in your inbox.
I would like to extend a big thank you to Vamsi for sharing his insights with Big Tech Careers readers.
We are hosting a FREE webinar on Thursday, December 18th where we will dive deep into strategies for preparing for big tech interviews and have special offer for you to try the Revarta Platform.
I like the emphasis on understanding the context and expected language of the target company. Hard to accomplish if you've never worked at the next level of scale, but crucial to attempt.
I like the emphasis on understanding the context and expected language of the target company. Hard to accomplish if you've never worked at the next level of scale, but crucial to attempt.