We're excited to share that BestPracticer is now Practica! We're still offering the same domain-specific coaching and leveling platform. If you had an account on BestPracticer, you can sign in with the same credentials. Read more here

Engineering Career Ladders

As engineering organizations grow and add more complexity with team members at different levels of experience, they also need to create clarity: the list of job levels, and what each role does. Done well, a career ladder can limit bias and provide a framework for hiring, paying, and promoting. Note: The articles below are often an introduction to the company's level guide, and the actual career ladder is a PDF or spreadsheet linked to from the article.

What You'll Learn

Intro to Standard Engineering Roles
Building a Career Ladder
Leveling Up as an Engineer
Engineering Career Ladders From Leading Companies

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
  Eric Elliot, Computer Scientist, Adobe
  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 Patel, Engineering Manager, Stripe
  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
  Marco Rogers, Director Of Engineering, Lever
  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 Majors, CTO, Honeycomb
  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
  Camille Fournier, Managing Director, Two Sigma
  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
  Bryan Mahoney, CTO, 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
  Michael White, Engineering Lead, Square
  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
  Valerie Lanard, Director of Engineering, Patreon
  The Patreon team outlines common expectations and examples of an engineer’s skills and responsibilities at each level.
- Engineering Career Development at Etsy
  Ryan Bateman, Engineering, 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
  James Turnbull, SVP of Engineering, Sotheby's
  Kickstarter's approach has fewer levels and uses textual descriptions rather than a matrix of skills.
- Spotify Technology Career Steps
  Kevin Goldsmith, VP Engineering, Consumer, Spotify
  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
  Jamie Talbot, Director of Engineering, Medium
  Medium has since run into issues with this version of their leveling guides, and is no longer using this vision.
- Engineering Ladders at Meetup
  Lara Hogan, VP, Engineering, Kickstarter

Engineering Career Ladders

Intro to Standard Engineering Roles

Building a Career Ladder

Leveling Up as an Engineer

Engineering Career Ladders From Leading Companies

Related Skills