Engineer stories: career progression
Last week, Engineering Managers Mark Tootal and Jenny Sivapalan double-teamed this nifty blog post to explain how career development works for Accurx engineers. (Special shout out to the inclusion of our public progression framework and staff salary bandings! 🗣️).
So this week, we wanted to bring our career development principles to life and let some of our very lovely and very brilliant engineers share their stories of life at Accurx. So… over to them!
Emma Machin — Senior Product Engineer
What was your background before joining Accurx and your role on starting?
When I joined Accurx in 2019, I started as a Junior Engineer (a title that no longer exists here!). Before this, I wrote automated tests in C# at a large defence company. There are lots of different responsibilities to my role today. When I’m not coding, you can find me in team meetings, in mentoring sessions or attending guild sessions with others in the engineering community.
My first priority on starting was to build up my knowledge of Accurx’s codebase and get familiar with desktop development. Fortunately, I had the chance to work in two teams across a couple of different products and this provided the technical variety that helped me pick things up quickly.
How has your role changed since then?
After just over a year, I was promoted to Product Engineer. 🎉 For the next two years, I worked on Accurx’s Accumail product, which enables healthcare professionals to find and contact each other easily, while saving all communication back to patient records.
As time went on, I wanted to work on problems that span both the front end and back end so that I could grow into a full stack engineer. Given I’d spent a lot of this time working on front end features, I did a plural sight course on entity framework and started attending backend guild meetings to plug the gaps in my knowledge.
All of this led me to recently be promoted to Senior Engineer. It’s an exciting step forward and has seen me take on more responsibility, such as providing more technical context to Product Managers, taking more of a lead on technical problem-solving and supporting other engineers.
What has been your experience of/approach to career progression at Accurx?
For me, it hasn’t just been about product work. It’s been about taking responsibility elsewhere too, such as making code changes that impact multiple products, marking take-home for back end engineering candidates, mentoring an apprentice and taking ownership of any technical incidents. I’ve been focused on building my knowledge, showing ownership, collaborating with other engineers and purposefully picking up work that would challenge me.
At Accurx, we have a clear progression framework, which sets out our roles, responsibilities and expectations at each stage of our careers. I find the framework really useful to refer to, to check how I’m doing against expectations and decide what I should focus on to help me progress to the next grade. Something I definitely value is having a clear progression pathway that doesn’t force you to take on line management duties to reach the higher engineering grades.
What are your plans for future career development?
In the longer term, I haven’t yet decided whether to branch off into engineering management, or whether to continue on the technical path. I’m keen to gain some management experience, but don’t want to give up on day-to-day coding any time soon! So for now I would like to stay technical, with the aim of becoming the Tech Lead of a team at some point in the next few years. I think this will provide a good balance of management experience while continuing to deliver value for our users through product development.
Luke de Beneducci — Senior Product Engineer
What was your background before joining Accurx and your role on starting?
I joined Accurx as a Junior Product Engineer fresh out of university with a load of imposter syndrome and no idea what my future was going to look like. Now, almost three and a half years later, I’m a Senior Product Engineer and Tech Lead of a team of four other engineers.
When I first joined Accurx, it was great to be able to soak up the knowledge of the more Senior Engineers in the team. There were just five other engineers in the company, all on the same team and with no explicit Engineering Managers or progression framework. Within four months, we had hired a few more engineers and split into two teams. Four months after that, we entered the pandemic and things really started to escalate as the company got incredibly busy trying to build useful products fast.
Coming to the end of my first year at Accurx, I had been working across the stack picking up small tasks in both the front and back end parts across the majority of our products. As we had started ramping up hiring, I ended up helping to onboard a lot of new joiners while taking the lead on the first version of our internal design library.
How has your role changed since then?
For the next six months, I bounced around from team to team as we started spinning up new products, gaining a load of experience from a load of talented engineers, designers, researchers, and Product Managers. All of this built up to me getting promoted to Product Engineer a year and a half after joining Accurx.
By this point, we had a set of Engineering Managers and a V1 of our engineering progression framework. So armed with this, my manager and I set about creating six month goals. These focused on sharpening my technical skills, picking up more complex and autonomous pieces of work, and my soft skills, helping onboard and upskill new joiners.
I focused on a few sets of goals like this over the next 18 months based on the feedback coming out of my performance reviews and weekly 1:1s with my manager. I tried to keep the goals evenly balanced between engineering and soft skills to grow both at the same pace. For the next 18 months, I cycled through slowly stretching the autonomy and technicality of the pieces of work I was doing while getting better at supporting my peers.
After 14 months, I was asked to help support a new team as Tech Lead and then — four months later around my three year anniversary — I was promoted to a Senior Product Engineer, where I’ve been happily bedding in for the last few months. Despite this, I still get a lot of imposter syndrome sometimes but every extra bit of experience I gain gives me more confidence in what I’m doing.
What has been your experience of/approach to career progression at Accurx?
One thing that has surprised me about career progression was that my manager was willing to support me to go at the pace I wanted to. I could have pushed to become a Senior Engineer 12 months after my previous promotion, but I valued my work life balance so decided to aim for a slightly slower approach. This let me ‘bed’ in at my new level rather than over-stretching before pushing to become senior.
What are your plans for future career development?
I’m just hoping to be a good Tech Lead for my team and make sure that I can help them upskill like all of the people that have helped me along the way. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll be a Staff Engineer, but I’m in no rush. I’m happy, as long as I can keep growing and working on interesting problems with some of the best people around.
Jaz Lalli — Staff Engineer
What was your background before joining Accurx and your role on starting?
Before Accurx, I had many years of engineering experience and spent three years as a Lead Frontend Engineer at a small startup of about 30 people. Starting my job search, I had a clear idea of what I was looking for. Firstly, I knew I wanted to be a hands-on engineer rather than go down a management route. Secondly, I knew I wanted to become a Staff Engineer.
At first, I didn’t have any luck obtaining this particular role and soon saw that being hired at Staff-level without a proven record as one was unlikely. So I switched to applying for Senior Engineer roles and set the goal to reach Staff at the earliest opportunity. And so it was. I joined Accurx as a Senior Product Engineer in April 2021 and upon completing my probation (literally on the same day), I said to my manager: “I want to aim for Staff at the next review cycle”.
How has your role changed since then?
I’m happy to say that, in October 2022, I reached my aim of becoming a Staff Engineer. It didn’t happen at my first review, but the next one, another six months down the line. In that period, I also moved to the Platform team, which is focused on building Accurx’s infrastructure, so that product teams have what they need to quickly and effectively meet user needs.
This switch helped me to show the best of myself, and because the work aligned well to my skills and motivations, played a part in me getting to Staff. To anyone else thinking about, or navigating, a promotion I would impart the same advice: develop an appreciation of what gives you energy and motivation, and what aligns to your strengths. Once you have, try to find a space to match — though be aware that those things also need to connect with the company values and objectives.
On Staff Engineer roles specifically, it is still a relatively under-documented or talked about position, especially in the UK. Over time, I’ve had to do lots of reading and researching about it, leaning heavily on Will Larson’s StaffEng site and more recently Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineers Path.
What has been your experience of/approach to career progression at Accurx?
For me, I use Accurx’s very thorough and detailed Engineering Progression Framework in the same way I use a cooking recipe. I can’t follow recipes word for word. Just the thought of it gives me angst. Whenever I’ve tried, I have to read the recipe in full, from the beginning, every time I need something from it. Instead, I prefer to read the recipe once, make mental notes, and then set it aside. This means I’m never going to produce exactly what the recipe lays out, but I am confident that I’ll produce something decent.
What I get from doing this is the space to apply my own thinking, to tweak things to suit my current needs/preferences, and to feel a greater sense of agency. Reflecting on how I navigate the Engineering Progression Framework, I do exactly the same. By also maintaining an open dialogue with my manager along the way, and with a strong sense that we’re both working towards the same goal, we’ve been able to make this work well.
My approach to career progression obviously isn’t going to apply to, or perhaps even resonate with, everyone else’s. But the more stories are out in the open of what it can look like, the more we can normalise different and diverse journeys.
Interested in joining Emma, Luke and Jaz on our engineering team? Take a look at our career page for the latest job roles.
