Engineering: how career development works at Accurx
TLDR: Career development matters to us at Accurx — it really matters. That’s why we publish a public progression framework and salary bandings, and set aside dedicated time for all our engineers to discuss personal development with their line managers.
Mark from Accurx here. 👋 Like my colleague Jenny (who I’ve written this post with!) I’m an Engineering Manager at Accurx. Our job is to support and scale up the company’s engineering community and give it every possible means to thrive.
Making sure our engineers have strong opportunities for career development is a big focus of ours. Though Accurx’s core thinking around career progression hasn’t changed, our processes are constantly evolving to make sure we’re supporting our engineering community the best way we can. In this post, you can see some of the different ways we do this…
🌄 Our approach to career development
We believe that career development is — and excuse the cliché — a journey. It’s a personal journey we each take into an unchartered territory of new expectations, responsibilities and accountabilities.
At Accurx, we trust that you are uniquely qualified to lead your own journey. That means we won’t tell you what to do but, instead, look to share that journey with you and provide support along the way.
🗺️ Career progression: Mapping out your path
In just the last two years, our engineering team has tripled from 20 to 60. So it goes without saying that we need to review roles and levels regularly to see if they’re still fit for purpose. Below, you can see all the different engineering positions we have today at Accurx, with the common career paths plotted.
What each of our different roles mean
- Our Product Engineer roles are split into three types: 1, 2 and 3. These numbers are only used within the context of career progression to differentiate levels of responsibilities and expectations. They don’t form part of our formal job titles and you’ll never hear them used in team meetings and chats over coffee around the office.☕
- The numbers system helps our engineers to set clear career goals and priorities based on their level of experience. We previously titled our less experienced positions as ‘Junior’ though switched to numbers because we felt ‘junior’ didn’t express the confidence that we have in all our engineers, regardless of their seniority level.
- We also have different levels of Senior Engineers, 1 and 2, (see below!). We introduced these different levels this year because of the wide range in expectations that Senior Engineers have. For example, one engineer could be six months into their role and meeting their expectations with lots of room to grow, while another could be years into their path and possibly looking to stay at this level.
- Our newly formed Associate Engineering Manager role sets out to help people with a technical background transition into engineering management. We’re glad to say we’ve recently recruited two promising new Associate EMs who’ll start with us in the New Year.
- And if that wasn’t enough, we now have a new Senior Engineering Manager role. This applies to Engineering Managers who manage other EMs, drive ways of working, collaborate with other heads of department and influence strategy.
🗣️ Some callouts on career progression for engineers
- At Accurx, there are parallel engineering and engineering management paths to help everyone increase their impact and influence.
- There’s plenty of scope to move from a product team into an engineering management position — this being a side-ward move.
- Senior engineers wear different hats depending on the company’s business needs and their own interests. For more senior positions (e.g. Senior Product Engineer, Staff Engineer of Senior Engineering Manager), you’ll need to be a tech lead, technical specialist and an expert generalist.
- You don’t need to manage people to progress!
🏗️ Our progression frameworks and salary bands are public for all!
At Accurx, we publish both our progression frameworks and salary bands to help prospective applicants decide whether Accurx is the right place for them. Every progression framework sets out what’s expected for each role. For example, a Senior Product Engineer is expected to continuously provide useful feedback to others. There’s a card in the framework for that expectation with relevant examples.
Of course, we have different engineering disciplines at Accurx, and it’s important that everyone feels represented by the progression framework. For example, earlier this year, we realised that our DevOps team needed their own progression framework to reflect the skills, priorities and work they do.
💡 Quick tip: When you’re creating a progression framework for your team, be careful to avoid phrasing the skills and behaviours to be “product-engineer flavoured”. Some small phrasing tweaks as you go can save you a lot of refactoring effort later on (we learnt this the hard way!).
💭 Career development is structured around our 5 company values
We have 5 company values at Accurx that underpin everything we do — and this includes how we manage progression. We also have a strong feedback culture at Accurx, given continuous improvement is one of these values!
As well as identifying opportunities to improve, everyone receives regular feedback specifically on how they are performing against the progression framework. This gives everyone the information they need to confidently plan for the future.
🚀 Career development: From day one on
- Starting at Accurx, all new engineers receive a plan for their first 90 days. Your line manager initially creates this and you work on this together. This outlines roles and responsibilities, what success looks like, what support you might need and key tasks for your first 30 days. The progression framework provides the foundation for this.
- Every week, you have a weekly 1:1 with your line manager where you have the opportunity to discuss career development , challnges and get feedback. No matter how busy the week or what’s on, we always commit to this.
- Twice a year, we have a six monthly performance review cycle. You and your line manager review your performance against the progression framework. You can demonstrate your performance in many ways including things you’ve built and feedback you’ve received. The engineering community line managers run calibration sessions to make sure the performance review is as fair and unbiased as possible. Pay decisions are made based on both our public salary bandings and performance against the expectations of each role.
🤝 We involve engineers in our hiring initiatives
Over the last year, we’ve expanded our career development opportunities beyond the management and technical realms. As part of this, we chose to involve our engineers in our hiring initiatives more (which they were — fortunately — very keen to be involved with!).
Interviewing others is a valuable skill for engineers so we’ve evaluated what contributions look like at different engineer levels and added these responsibilities to our progression frameworks.
Hopefully you found this useful. You can look out for live engineering roles on our careers page today!
