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I am nearing the end of my 6 months probation. My manager feels that I'm going towards an Approaching rating (like Meets Most) rather than a Thriving rating (Meets All). He feels that I lack in contribution to group level engineering discussions and being technically strong enough to mentor other engineers, which he expects from a senior engineer like me.

He keeps going through the growth and development framework and highlights he is concerned I don't meet B3 senior expectations. He increased the frequency of 1:1s to twice a week.

He didn't mention the word PIP but gave me to do a project with a very tight deadline to assess my coding and implementation skills. Now that I'm making good progress in it after a lot of effort, he brought up weaknesses in the engineering direction and discussion points.

My other team members think I am doing ok and my performance isn't too bad, though there are things I can work on.

It sometimes feels like my manager already made up his mind to make me fail probation and is finding weaknesses even if I complete this stressful project.

He even talked about downlevelling if that's a possibility and being asked to leave. He said extension of probation is not possible due to legal reasons.

What do you recommend I do?

I used to be a mid-level Business Engineer at a FAANG company and recently joined this company as a SWE 4 months ago. Although it was a pleasant surprise to be uplevelled during the interview, I feel like I am not performing at my level now. There are backend engineering conversations where I lose context pretty fast. In fact the mid level engineers in my team are much more knowledgeable and faster than me. I don't want to bother them to explain too much because it feels like everyone else (even those who are relatively new) "gets it" except for me.

I have a young toddler who only goes to daycare twice a week (due to affordability). The rest of the days I have to cook and get him to eat and attend to him during work hours occasionally. As a result, I stretch my day but it feels like I am going to burn out soon. I work from 5am to 11pm daily and work weekends because I feel I am lagging behind too much, but new things always pile up.

I feel really mentally drained out doing work continuously over the past few months. At the same time, I don't want the company to think they made a wrong decision to hire me at this level.