Engineering Career Ladders
Intro to Standard Engineering Roles
The first step in understanding what goes in to an engineering career ladder framework is to understand job titles and roles.
- Software Roles and Titles
This article shares a great introductory overview to engineering positions. Eric provides general guidelines with the caveat that the details of the roles can vary from company to company. • Engineering Fellow • CEO • CTO • CIO/Chief Digital Officer/Chief Innovation Officer • VP of Engineering/Director of Engineering • Chief Architect • Software Architect • Engineering Manager • Technical Lead/Engineering Lead/Team Lead • Principal Software Engineer • Senior Software Engineer • Software Engineer • Junior Software Engineer • Intern Software Engineer
Building a Career Ladder
- Why you need an engineering ladder, and when to build one: Career paths, progression, promotion
Smruti explains: • Why both individual performance and team performance can be connected to career progression clarity • What form of engineering ladders are appropriate for organizations of 2, 20, 200, or 2000 engineers
- How to create a career ladder for your software engineering teams
In this 30-minute talk, Marco explains why engineering orgs need a career ladder, three basic frameworks for creating a career ladder, and tips for rolling one out.
Leveling Up as an Engineer
- Useful Things-to-know-about-engineering-levels
Charity addresses a common frustration of junior engineers around how quickly they are able to level up to more senior positions.
Engineering Career Ladders From Leading Companies
- Sharing Our Engineering Ladder
This is Rent the Runway's career ladder, one of the first to be publicly released. It groups skills into: Technical Skills, Getting Stuff Done, Impact, and Communication & Leadership.
- Building an Engineering Ladder at Glossier
Glosser's ladder provides example skills and behaviors across categories for Knowledge, Communications, Execution / Delivering Goals, and Discretion / Supervision.
- Square’s Growth Framework for Engineers and Engineering Managers
Square goes from L3 to L9 for individual contributors, and L5 to L9 for engineering managers (people managers). IC skill categories include Technical Execution, Ownership, Collaboration, and Team Building.
- Patreon Engineering Levels
The Patreon team outlines common expectations and examples of an engineer’s skills and responsibilities at each level.
- Engineering Career Development at Etsy
The Etsy team shares their engineering ladder and why they built it, why the content is what it is, and how it’s been put into use since its release.
- Kickstarter's Engineering & Data Science Career Ladders
Kickstarter's approach has fewer levels and uses textual descriptions rather than a matrix of skills.
- Spotify Technology Career Steps
Spotify technically has a matrix of skills across levels, but takes a different approach to what each level is, which they call "Steps": Individual, Chapter & Squad, Tribe & Guild, Company.
- Engineering Growth Tracks at Medium
Medium has since run into issues with this version of their leveling guides, and is no longer using this vision.