Career Paths for Senior Engineers at ClassPass
At ClassPass, senior engineers play a critical role in our engineering organization. They serve as tentpoles on our teams and mentors for more junior engineers. At ClassPass, for engineers below the senior level, career progression is fairly linear — in X years, an engineer should be performing at the next level. However, once an engineer hits the senior level at ClassPass, multiple paths open. We trust that they will spend their time in the best way possible, which means that, while there is less linearity to their career progression, there is also a great opportunity for impact.
We want to open our process to give candidates and others interested insight into our philosophy on engineering career growth. At a high level, senior engineers can grow in three ways. First, they can continue operating as a senior engineer indefinitely — the heart of a team. Second, they can become a staff engineer, pulling further away from shipping code directly to consumers so that they can influence the entire organization technically. Finally, they can become an engineering manager, leading a team of other engineers.
Senior Engineer
The first important distinction to make between a mid-level engineer and a senior engineer at ClassPass is that senior is a level at which an engineer can stay for the rest of their career — there is no expectation that they must become a staff engineer in X years. We believe that an experienced senior engineer has a distinct set of responsibilities compared to a staff engineer along with a distinct set of rewards. Of course, there is overlap but we need both roles.
A senior engineer’s primary job is to make their team the best it can be. At the role’s core is shipping great products and serving as a role model for other engineers on the team. This includes mentoring junior engineers on the team, coming up with ways to improve the team's workflow, and pitching in when others are out. Senior engineers primarily grow by taking on more complex projects. This might mean a project with ambiguous scope, shifting requirements, many stakeholders, or a combination of these. Staff engineers, on the other hand, aren’t primarily shipping great products nor do they grow from simply making their projects more complex. Their role is to think about our broader technical strategy and that will involve higher-leverage activities.
So how does one continue growing as a senior engineer who focuses on a team directly shipping impact to our consumers? One way is to continue growing their technical acumen — there are always projects with a larger scope to take on. They also might consider embodying one of several archetypes:
- Tech lead: They balance coding, project management, unblocking and helping triage technical issues, reviewing technical documents, and delegating technical work to other engineers on their squad. They work closely with the engineering manager.
- Architect: They understand a core part of the squad’s codebase/product deeply and can leverage their expertise to lead large-scale technical initiatives in that area. For example, they may lead exploration in integrating a new vendor to expand a product capability.
- Solver: They jump into emergencies or interrupts and tackle tricky technical issues. They’re an expert at triaging and making the right technical call as quickly as possible. They also know when to dig deep and focus on a given problem for an extended period.
- Prototyper: They help extend the bandwidth of the engineering manager and determine the feasibility of speculative features or approaches.
Staff Engineer
The second path a senior engineer might consider is becoming a staff engineer. A staff engineer is primarily focused on how they can leverage their expertise to have maximal organization-wide impact. They’re not only a technical leader on their team but also an important driver of wider engineering initiatives.
A high leverage activity is usually something where the results are worth a high multiple of the energy put into it. The highest leverage activities for staff engineers will typically fall into two different categories:
- Technical: They design solutions that are resilient, scale easily, and make the work of others easier. They provide technical guidance to implement those solutions.
- People: They help grow others across the entire organization, whether that’s through 1:1 mentorship or leading a book club or paper reading session.
Generally, our Staff engineers focus comparatively less of their time on directly shipping impactful products and more of their time on maximizing the impact all of engineering can have. If you’re looking to understand more about our staff engineering philosophy, a good starting point is Will Larson’s book Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track.
Engineering Manager
The third path for a senior engineer is to become an engineering manager. It’s important to note that we view this as a lateral move onto a different career ladder and that it is one of three paths for continued growth as a senior engineer rather than the sole way of driving more impact. Simply put, their responsibilities move from building technical projects to leading technical people. Their day-to-day will look dramatically different. A typical week will include recurring 1:1s with the engineers they manage, syncs with the product manager and designer of their team, sprint meetings, syncs with other managers, technical deep dives, and interviews (sometimes technical, sometimes informational). They will also have impromptu calls to work through immediate concerns, take on interrupts so that engineers on their team aren’t distracted, and handle the administrative parts of the job (e.g., approving PTO and expenses). Because we require our engineering managers to be deeply technical, taking on interrupts may mean writing some code too!
Their performance is tied to their team’s output and not their own individual contribution. This is a fundamental shift in how they’ll think about their own productivity and will take some time to get used to. They won’t be “productive” if they create a lot of pull requests. Rather, they’ll be productive if their team continues to deliver projects that have a material impact on the business, while keeping the team healthy and growing.
Engineering management can be immensely fulfilling for some engineers and not a good fit for others. That’s why, at ClassPass, senior engineers who become engineering managers can transition back to being an engineer if it isn’t a good fit for them. We strongly believe that having great leaders, whether they are individual contributors or managers, is critical to our success and that skills learned through the experience of managing will continue to be useful to engineers who transition back to being individual contributors.
We hope this helps you better understand how ClassPass approaches career growth for more senior engineers. We place a lot of trust in our more senior roles and they have a lot of opportunity (and responsibility) to drive impact — whether that’s at the heart of a team shipping products, a technical leader helping the organization improve, or a manager working with a team.
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