Author: Jonah Glover | Engineering Manager, Fraud Prevention
Often during discussions with candidates, I get asked: “Will my career progression at Remitly be straightforward, transparent, and consistent with other engineers at the company?” This is an excellent question and one that all engineers should consider when job hunting. As an engineering manager at Remitly, I’m here to tell you more about our approach and what you can expect if you join our team.
Remitly values the experience of having a fair and clear engineering bar across the organization. In order to make sure that we maintain this consistency and transparency, the engineering management team is committed to career progression and has developed critical tools to help define progression, calibrate performance, and assess promotion readiness. By the end of this blog post, you’ll have a broad overview of the career tracks we provide and what you can generally expect as you grow with us. You’ll also understand the general scope and expectations we have for engineers in each role. I hope you come away feeling confident that there is a “method to our madness” and that our engineering management team is here to support you and your career.
So, let’s imagine you’ve accepted an offer to join my team …
Your Engineering Manager
You and I will set up 1:1 meetings to help ensure you have the support you need to put your best foot forward. We will also set up recurring career development meetings to check-in on how you feel you are progressing on the goals we have set together. One primary outcome of these meetings is a set of action items to coordinate and find opportunities that can help you close potential gaps in your skillset. In addition, you can typically expect honest and helpful feedback to help guide your development and make sure you’re on track to meet your career goals.
As managers at Remitly, we feel it’s our job to celebrate your wins and be there for you when you’re feeling frustrated, anxious, or blocked. We work hard to be present and engaged when we work together and to have your best interest at heart.
Engineering Growth Opportunities
Under our structure, engineers at the beginning of their careers typically start as “software builders.” As an engineer, you build software with increasing capability, responsibility, and ownership. When you begin your career as a software engineer at Remitly, your scope and role will likely change in the following way as you grow:
SDE 1
- You are becoming familiar with engineering principles, tools, and processes.
- Scope: self
Focus placed mainly on learning and growing yourself as an engineerYou are becoming familiar with writing tech specs, tests, effective code, and addressing bugs independentlyYou are learning to become part of an engineering team and interacting with team processes and ceremonies
SDE 2
- You are proficient with a specific component or product sub-area
- Scope: self, and own team
You are decomposing requirements into tasks, providing estimates, and independently writing tech specs and design documents.You become proficient with a specific component or product sub-area in your team.You partner with and mentor other engineers
SDE 3
- You own your team’s systems and technical strategy
- Scope: self, own/other teams
You own your team’s systems and technical strategyYou write system design specsYou solve complex technical challenges and issuesYou improve team rituals and processes
Once you reach SDE 3, the following paths are typically available:
Staff Engineer
- Continue Building Software
- Keep excelling as an L3 (i.e., build software and enjoy continued growth and development)
- Scope: self, own/other teams, and organization
You own your team’s systems and cross-team technical strategyYou solve complex technical challenges and issues across system and team boundariesYou improve cross-team rituals and processes
Principal Engineer
- Designing Systems and Technology
- This path would require developing and augmenting technical and system design skills and developing expertise in one or more technical disciplines
- Scope: self, own/other teams, and organization
You provide technical vision, leadership, and direction across domains that span multiple systems and teams.You solve our most complex technical challenges and issuesYou lead, coach, and mentor engineers across the organization to achieve a high bar on engineering excellence
Engineering Manager
- Managing People and Teams
- This path would require developing and augmenting your technical and engineering background, coupled with people management skills.
- Scope of impact: team and organization
You set goals, assign responsibilities, and hold team members accountableYou coach your teams through goal setting, assigning responsibility, and holding accountabilityYou partner with other engineering teams effectively and efficiently
Expectations for these roles are further categorized under the following three functional areas:
- Technical Craft
- Communication
- Decision Making & Leadership
As Engineering Managers, these functional areas encourage us to think structurally about your development and achievement. Even as an SDE 1, you’ll typically get an opportunity to advocate for your technical ideas or lead specific sub-projects. We value developing all three of these areas in engineers no matter your level.
We also understand that each individual’s career aspirations may change and grow. With that in mind, we expect and encourage our engineering team to experiment with these different opportunities and tracks rather than think of them as permanent commitments. We are here to support you and your growth to drive impact for our customers at Remitly and beyond.
Measuring Growth & Performance
At Remitly, when considering engineering performance, the primary readiness indicator for the next level/role is customer and business impact. Our leadership team came up with a rough “formula” to help guide our thinking:
Functional Aspects of the Job (“What I Do / Role Expectations”)
+ Remitly’s Cultural Values (“How I Do It”)
= Results (“Customer Centric / Business Impacting Outcomes”)
We understand that engineers on different teams may have various opportunities available. And, if an organization measures impact based only on a checklist of achievements, this may put engineers at a disadvantage if their team can’t offer them a specific opportunity at predictable times. Remitly’s approach generally provides engineers with the flexibility to demonstrate performance in ways that align with their unique career aspirations and the available options on their teams, rather than needing to check a box.
In addition to providing flexibility, our performance assessment approach also helps us make sure we consider our core cultural values. It’s important that our engineers provide excellent value to our customers and do it in a way that aligns with our culture and mission.
At Remitly, we have a culture of giving direct feedback early. Being constructively direct is one of our core values! As engineering managers, we will typically have performance discussions early and often to discuss what opportunities you may need to grow your career and approach them with our cultural values in mind to create the best possible experience for our customers.
Join Us!
Does our career growth approach resonate with you? Then, email me jonahg@remitly.com or check out our careers page and join the team!
We are just getting started! #wjgs
