Career Path Engineering @iAdvize (Part 2)
As a reminder, the first part is available here: Career Path Engineering @iAdvize (Part 1)
Career Path Engineering — The Result
Now, we can answer the question of candidates and employees at iAdvize: what are the opportunities for evolution within the Engineering teams?
Thus, a Software Engineer can realize his or her career path, depending on his or her expertise and experience, his or her learning pace and the evolution of the organization (product developments, languages, team size, etc.). The opportunities and possibilities are numerous and allow you to project yourself in time.
The first step in identifying opportunities is to identify the level in the hierarchy at which the employee is located. Each level is defined via the Career Ladder and describes the expectations and requirements (Scope, Impact, Skills, Behaviour).
A) 7-level Career Path
The Career Path at iAdvize is composed of 7 levels (8 possible):
- 1: Junior {Discipline} Engineer
- 2: {Discipline} Engineer
- 3: Senior {Discipline} Engineer
- 4: Staff Engineer
- 5: Principal Engineer (Expertise Track)
- 5 (bis): Engineering Manager (Management Track)
- 6: Director of Engineering(Management Track)
- 7: Chief Technical Officer
These levels will evolve according to the engineering organization in the coming years.
B) Career Ladder - 7 levels and 2 paths
At iAdvize, we believe that the path to management is not the only way to build a career. Managing a team should be a choice, not the only way to grow within an organization and get more responsibilities. We have therefore constructed two possible paths:
- Management with the level of Engineering Manager, Director of Engineering or CTO.
- Expertise by evolving from [Discipline] Engineer to Senior, Staff or Principal Engineer.
The Career Path Engineering as shared above, is intended to be regularly updated.
Each level is defined according to 4 axes:
- Impact: what is your impact on the company, at what level of the organization? This is the most important axis.
- Scope: what is your scope of action? How far has your scope progressed? What is the technicality or complexity of the problems solved within this scope?
- Skills: what are the necessary and required skills at this level?
- Behaviours: what are the expected behaviors at this level?
We intentionally avoided creating separate tracks for each discipline: Software (Back, Front, Mobile), System (Infra/Cloud/Platform/DevOps, SRE), Machine Learning…
We chose to focus on the practice of engineering itself, so it doesn’t matter what programming language or set of technologies you use.
The 4 axes:
Impact
Impact measures your area of influence and your individual contribution to our success as a company, by contributing to iAdvize’s mission and goals. This is the main driver of progress at iAdvize. The industry in which you work can allow you to make an impact in different ways — for example, by contributing to revenue growth through successful and innovative products, team efficiency (productivity), cost reduction, regulatory requirements, etc. You can also have an impact in other indirect ways, such as improving engineering practices or mentoring other engineers as they progress.
Focusing on impact allows us to value engineers who add value through their actions without the need to perform specific routines. We believe that impact results from a combination of technical skills acquisition, the ability to apply them to their assignments, the experience they gain over time, and their association with behaviors and core competencies.
Scope
The Scope is the scope of the work you are asked to execute. Depending on how broad, complex or technical it is, the amount of information you need to do your job effectively may vary greatly in order to achieve your goals. You may only need a limited amount of information, or you may be able to understand the entire organization, the iAdvize architecture, etc.
Skills
Skills define the essential skills that an engineer must possess to be competent and successful in his or her job. An engineer can develop his skills by deepening a technology (vertical growth) or by learning new topics, new technologies (horizontal growth). Our software engineers have annual licenses for online training such as Pluralsight, in order to continuously learn and update their knowledge and practices.
Behaviours
Behaviours describe a set of expectations that enhance collaboration, communication, group facilitation, skills transfer, business acumen, etc. This area of “soft skills” is therefore analyzed outside of the skills and impact axis. It is a set of personality attributes and motivations that iAdvize engineers must embody in order to advance in the organization. It is not the intention of the career path to describe in detail each expected behavior, some of them being part of the iAdvize culture: respect for others and inclusion, humility, team spirit or curiosity.
Below is a summary of the levels listed in our Career Ladder:
We cannot share the entire document with you as it is very complete (each level has its own expectations in terms of Impact, Scope, Skills and Behaviours), it remains open to all internally.
Level 1 - Junior {Discipline} Engineer
Learn the basics
This level is primarily intended for interns, students and recent graduates who join iAdvize. The Junior Engineer must learn all the basics of engineering, in addition to the knowledge acquired during his/her training.
Level 2 - {Discipline} Engineer
Learn the framework
Engineers at this level have a solid background in engineering, although they may need to develop expertise in a specific product (payment, authentication, AI/Bot, etc.) and in the product development process. They typically work with other swarms or tech team members for support.
Level 3 - Senior {Discipline} Engineer
Master the framework
At level 3, the Senior {Discipline} Engineer is completely autonomous. He is a technically strong individual contributor, consistent in his performance and progress, and able to be a reference on a language or product. Their contribution is not limited to their individual goals and delivery of work; they also demonstrate the ability to take ownership of team/swarm projects in order to facilitate quality delivery.
When recruiting for levels 1 and 2, P&E management is committed to the development of engineers to reach at least this level 3 - Senior.
Level 4 - Staff Engineer
Go beyond the framework
A Staff Engineer is a leader, with an impact within his team/swarm and in his technical area. As an engineer, he or she has technical authority over his or her area of expertise, with influence outside of it.
Moving to this 4th level is a challenging step, with new responsibilities and expectations. Even though it is accessible to iAdvize engineers, the opportunities to become a Staff Engineer are more limited than those of a senior.
Staff engineers: “A level at the crossroads”
This level is special in the career path, it is a key crossroads: by accessing this level, the staff engineer sees the 2 trajectories and refines his preferences and abilities to evolve towards technical expertise (Principal Engineer) or towards Technical Management (Engineering Manager) :
- Some Staff Engineers may have human resources management responsibilities and play the role of “Staff Engineer Manager”, which is a potential step towards technical management. They guide the approach and execution of their Swarm/team. They can be a relay of their own manager and potentially manage up to ~4–5 people, in limited numbers to remain “hands-on” (technically operational), while being confronted with the management of individuals and the associated managerial posture.
- Conversely, some staff engineers can remain exclusively individual contributors, deepen their expertise and get involved in technical committees. They are responsible for the direction, quality and approach in certain critical areas of the product. They combine deep technical constraints with the need for innovation.
It is not mandatory to become a manager in order to grow and take on responsibilities.he Staff Engineer level allows you to better discover yourself by experiencing certain facets of the role.
Depending on the individual, the focus may be on one of the two types and the balance of skills/behaviors will adapt accordingly.
Level 5 - Principal Engineer
Create or add to the framework
The definition of the Principal Engineer role is not yet fully finalized in the Career Ladder, for the simple reason that we have not experienced this level yet.
From the engineering team’s perspective, this level will be dedicated to technical experts who have rich and varied experience in different organizations and technical domains, this will be the highest level of individual contributor.
Their reponsibility will be to define the technical vision in conjunction with the CTO (technical architecture choices, anticipation of medium/long term needs, response and intervention on complex technical issues etc.).
It will also include the adoption and sharing of practices internally and externally.
Level 5 - Engineering Manager
The Engineering Managers’ missions are based on three fundamental pillars:
- Business: They are the direct partners of the product teams to understand and challenge the product objectives. They are also in charge of answering questions from the “customer facing” teams or sometimes directly related to the customers on technical issues that the support teams could not handle.
- Tech: The scope, as defined above, being generally large, unlike Staff Engineer Managers, they are rarely hands-on and active on the code base. Naturally they rely on technical project leads that they name explicitly. They are the guarantors of the success of the projects down the road.
- People: They are above all managers, with the human qualities essential to this role, and have a collective mindset.
Level 6 - Director of Engineering
The Director of Engineering has a role similar to that of the Engineering Manager on several teams. In addition, he is responsible for other transversal and key themes for the department, in particular financial management (FinOps), quality strategy and security of the solution.
Level 7 - CTO (Chief Technical Officer)
Like his leadership and management staff, the CTO is defined and animated around the three pillars: Business, Tech, People. He ensures that the various processes are followed and makes decisions in case of disagreement. He ensures that the projects undertaken are in line with the company’s strategy.
Together with the CPO (Chief Product Officer), he is responsible for the Product&Engineering division at iAdvize and is a member of the company’s Executive Committee.
C) Career Path Engineering — Individual Assessment
This Career Path is not intended to be very detailed. It is intended to be inspirational, model-like and to articulate the important distinctions between levels.
The goal is not to create an exercise that you can simply “check off”.
The main objective of this tool is to accompany each engineer in his or her career path. It is not a quarterly performance evaluation tool, with level progression/regression. There is no quota or learning time associated to each level. It is a guide to assigning tasks in line with each person’s level of skills and abilities, while gradually increasing their impact.
We rely on trained managers (we have a dedicated training program for them) to analyze an engineer’s level as soon as he or she is hired. Subsequently, during the annual interview, this level will be reviewed and a development plan will be drawn up so that each engineer can project himself and be an actor in his progress.
In order to change levels, the manager must be able to observe and validate that the engineer has consistently and continuously demonstrated his or her ability to meet expectations in each area.
Finally, all four axes within a level are essential: the 4 axes of the “Level 1” level must be satisfied before moving on to the next level “Level 2”, etc.
************************************
Thank you for reading the part 2!
To continue your reading, Engineering Part 3 (Feedbacks) is available here: https://medium.com/iadvize-engineering/career-path-engineering-part-3-e9591c113d88
************************************
