The Three Positioning Formulas That Prevent Down-Leveling - Part 2
System to ensures you get offered your true level
Hey, Prasad here 👋 I’m the voice behind the weekly newsletter “Big Tech Careers.”
This week, I bring you part 2 of a 2-part series on avoiding downleveling from our guest writer, Vamsi Narla, Founder of Revarta and former Director of Engineering and Product at Remitly.
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Over to you, Vamsi!
In Part 1, we explored why down-leveling happens. We discovered that every company evaluates experience differently across three dimensions: Scope and Impact, Technical Depth and Complexity, and Leadership and Influence.
We learned that the translation problem—failing to map your experience to the interviewer’s mental model—is what causes candidates to sound junior despite being truly senior.
Now in Part 2, we move to the solution: strategic positioning techniques, practical preparation strategies, and deliberate practice methods that will help you communicate your true level in any company’s context. These are the same techniques that prevent down-leveling and help you land offers at the level you deserve.
How to Position Your Experience to Avoid Down-Leveling
Here’s what I learned from 1000+ interviews: The candidates who avoid down-leveling don’t just answer questions. They strategically position their experience to map to the company’s mental model.
1. Lead With Scope and Impact (Translated to Their Scale)
Instead of: “I worked on a feature used by 10,000 users.”
Try: “I led a feature that affected 10,000 users—about 15% of our active base at the time—which translated to $500K in additional annual revenue.”
Why it works: You’ve translated the number into:
Percentage of company (shows relative importance)
Business impact (shows you think beyond just technical delivery)
Now the interviewer can map this to their scale: “15% of our base would be 2M users, and if they generated similar revenue per user, that’s showing senior-level impact thinking.”
2. Explain the Complexity in Universal Terms
Instead of: “I worked on a complex distributed system.”
Try: “I designed a system that needed to handle 10K requests per second with 99.99% uptime, balancing consistency vs. availability trade-offs across three data centers. The constraint was we couldn’t add cost, so I had to optimize existing infrastructure.”
Why it works: You’ve explained complexity through:
Concrete scale numbers (10K rps, 99.99% uptime)
Trade-offs (consistency vs. availability, performance vs. cost)
Constraints (can’t add cost)
The interviewer can now assess: “They understand distributed systems trade-offs, performance optimization, and working under business constraints. That’s senior-level thinking.”
3. Show Leadership Through Influence, Not Just Title
Instead of: “I was the tech lead on the project.”
Try: “I didn’t have formal authority over the product or data engineering teams, but I drove alignment by documenting the trade-offs, running decision-making meetings, and building consensus across stakeholders. When we hit a disagreement about timeline vs. quality, I facilitated the discussion that got everyone to agree on a phased approach.”
Why it works: You’ve demonstrated leadership through:
Influence without authority (cross-functional impact)
Structured decision-making (not just informal chats)
Navigating disagreement (handling conflict constructively)
The interviewer thinks: “They can lead even when they don’t have org chart power. That’s exactly what we need for this level.”
Practice Is What Makes Positioning Natural
Here’s the problem with positioning: it’s a skill you need to practice.
You can understand these concepts right now. But in the actual interview, under pressure, you’ll default to chronological reporting unless you’ve practiced strategic positioning.
Why Most People Can’t Position Well In Interviews
When the interviewer asks “Tell me about a time you led a complex technical project,” your brain retrieves the story. You start talking. You’re focused on:
Remembering the details
Explaining what happened
Not leaving out important parts
You’re not thinking about:
How to position this for their company’s scale
What aspects of scope/complexity/leadership to emphasize
How to translate your metrics into their mental model
That’s why down-leveling happens despite preparation.
You know your stories. You understand the frameworks. But you haven’t practiced the specific skill of strategic positioning until it’s automatic.
The Practice That Prevents Down-Leveling
The candidates I’ve seen avoid down-leveling consistently have practiced enough that positioning becomes natural:
Early attempts (practices 1-3): They tell the story chronologically. They forget to mention business impact. They use their old company’s metrics without translation. They don’t emphasize the right leadership elements.
Mid attempts (practices 4-6): They remember to mention scope and impact. They start translating metrics. But it still feels forced. They’re thinking hard about “did I demonstrate leadership?” instead of just demonstrating it naturally.
Later attempts (6+): Positioning is automatic. They naturally lead with translated scope. They explain complexity in universal terms. They show leadership through influence without explicitly saying “I showed leadership.”
The difference isn’t knowledge. It’s muscle memory from deliberate practice.
What Needs to Happen Outside the Interview
Preventing down-leveling doesn’t start when the interview begins. It starts with how you prepare and present yourself from the first interaction.
1. Research How This Company Thinks About Your Role
Before the interview:
Read the job description carefully—what competencies do they emphasize?
Look at the company’s engineering blog—what challenges do they talk about?
Check LinkedIn for people in similar roles—what do they highlight in their profiles?
Understand their scale—users, revenue, team size, technical stack
This research tells you their mental model. Now you can position your experience to map to it.
2. Update Your Resume to Match Their Context
If you’re interviewing at a company that cares deeply about scale, and your resume says “improved system performance,” you’re missing an opportunity.
Better: “Improved system performance from 100 rps to 5K rps while maintaining 99.9% uptime, supporting 500K daily active users.”
Your resume is setting up your positioning before you even speak.
3. Practice Positioning, Not Just Stories
Most people practice by rehearsing their stories. That’s not enough.
Practice specifically:
How to lead with scope and impact
How to translate your metrics to different company scales
How to explain complexity in universal terms
How to demonstrate leadership through influence
This is deliberate practice on the skill that prevents down-leveling: strategic positioning.
4. Get Feedback on How You’re Being Heard
The gap between what you think you’re communicating and what the interviewer actually hears is where down-leveling happens.
You think you’re demonstrating senior-level impact. They hear “decent individual contributor work.”
The only way to close that gap is feedback from someone who:
Knows what senior-level positioning sounds like
Can tell you specifically what’s landing wrong
Can help you adjust until it lands right
This is exactly what practice environments like Revarta provide—not just feedback on your answer, but feedback on how you’re being positioned by your answer.
How Revarta Helps You Practice Positioning
This is why positioning matters so much in how I built Revarta’s feedback system.
After each practice interview, Revarta doesn’t just tell you if your answer was good or bad. It tells you:
What level your answer demonstrated: “Your answer showed solid individual contributor work but didn’t demonstrate scope and impact at the senior level.”
What was missing in your positioning: “You mentioned the project but didn’t quantify business impact or explain how you influenced teams.”
How to reposition for higher-level perception: “Lead with: ‘I drove a $2M revenue project across three teams.’ Then explain the technical challenges and how you aligned stakeholders without formal authority.”
The enhanced answer shows you: Your story, repositioned to demonstrate scope, complexity, and leadership clearly—so you can see exactly what senior-level positioning sounds like.
Then you practice again. And again. Until positioning is automatic.
Because the difference between getting down-leveled and getting the level you deserve often comes down to how you position the same experience.
The Down-Leveling Cost Calculator
Let me make this concrete with real numbers:
Software Engineer (L4) at Google: Total comp: ~$300K
Senior Software Engineer (L5) at Google: Total comp: ~$400K
Difference: $100K per year
Over a 5-year period: $500K in lost compensation
That’s for one level difference at one company. Now think about:
Compound effect over a career (higher level = faster growth)
Negotiation leverage in future roles
Retirement contributions based on higher salary
Stock growth if you stay at a high-growth company
The lifetime cost of getting down-leveled once can easily exceed $1M.
And the tragedy? It’s usually not because you lack the skills. It’s because you couldn’t translate and position your experience effectively in a 45-minute conversation.
What Companies Are Really Assessing
When interviewers decide on your level, they’re not just checking boxes on a rubric. They’re asking:
“Can I confidently tell my manager that this person is ready for [level] work at our company?”
If they have any doubt—any uncertainty about whether your experience translates to their context—they’ll recommend the safer (lower) level.
Your job is to remove that uncertainty through:
Strategic positioning that maps your experience to their mental model
Translated metrics that make sense at their scale
Universal language for complexity that demonstrates depth
Leadership demonstrated through influence, not just titles
And the only way to do this naturally, under pressure, is practice.
The Bottom Line
Down-leveling usually isn’t about lacking skills. It’s about failing to communicate those skills in the language the company understands.
Every company thinks differently about scale, complexity, and leadership. Your job is to:
Understand their mental model through research
Translate your experience into their context
Position strategically to demonstrate scope, complexity, and leadership
Practice until this positioning is automatic under pressure
The companies that offered me senior roles weren’t the ones where I had the most relevant experience. They were the ones where I positioned my experience most effectively in their context.
That’s a learnable skill. But like all skills, it requires deliberate practice with feedback.
Don’t let poor positioning cost you $100K+ per year.
Learn to translate. Practice positioning. Walk into interviews confident that you can demonstrate your level—no matter how different the company is from your past experience.
I would like to extend a big thank you to Vamsi for sharing his insights with Big Tech Careers readers.
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