Engineering Growth at Tradeshift
Building a thriving career at Tradeshift engineering
At Tradeshift, we digitize trade. We build products and services for a global network of 1.5 million buyers and sellers who use our trade technology platform to digitize supply chain payments, procurement, invoicing, workflow, and access B2B marketplaces.
We are a global, multicultural engineering team with some of the best and brightest people in the world. Our engineering environment is one where engineers can challenge themselves, learn from their peers, and deliver the best products for our customers. We want Tradeshift to be a place where every engineer has the tools and support to grow and thrive regardless of what stage they are in their career.
To achieve this we developed a set of processes and guidelines that form our Engineering Growth Framework, or EGF. Yes, we have many acronyms just like everyone else in the industry.
Guiding Principles
Before developing the EGF we started with some guiding principles that reflect our values as an organization and helped us stay honest when structuring the framework.
Growth is not only vertical — Growth is not just about climbing the ladder, but could be lateral between the various organizations within Engineering (Operations, Product Development, Security, etc) or even outside the organization (Product Management, Technical Services, Support, etc).
Celebrate diversity — Every employee is unique and has a unique combination of skills. As an organization, we encourage and support development of multi-dimensional teams that are able to adapt and change quickly.
Give our teams a voice — Define clear expectations at each level in the organization to give engineers the clarity they need to evaluate where they are in their career and identify the areas where they would benefit from developing further.
Establish trust in the process — Reduce ambiguity around career progression and encourage frequent, honest, and focused growth conversations between manager and employee.
Establish consistency and eliminate bias — Create a common basis for hiring decisions, performance reviews, fair and equitable compensation, and promotions within the organization.
Core Concepts of the Growth Framework
There are four components that work together in this framework.
Dimensions — A dimension represents a group of skills that are necessary for Tradeshift to achieve its goals. We use four dimensions - Technical skills, Execution and Delivery, Impact, and Culture.
Levels — Career progression at Tradeshift is a result of personal and professional development with increasing levels of responsibility, impact, and influence. The growth framework defines the following levels with increasing scale of influence.
- Level 1 — The apprentice scale
- Level 2 — The individual scale
- Level 3 — The team scale
- Level 4 — The product area scale
- Level 5 — The organization scale
- Level 6 — The company scale
Behaviors — The growth framework lists a set of key behaviors for a dimension at every level. These behaviors are designed to be indicators of what is expected at a particular level in the organization.
Take a look at our behaviors list here
Titles — Titles serve three key purposes. They acknowledge an employee’s current role and contributions, demonstrate their growth within the organization, and communicate an expected competency level to the company and to the outside world.
Assessment Principles
Assessing progress can be challenging. We want our engineers to be able to consistently, comfortably, and continuously exhibit the behaviors at their level. Therefore, we use the following to guide our formal assessments and establish the tone for ongoing growth.
Not a checkbox exercise — The behaviors in the framework are designed to paint a picture of what is typically expected at each level. It is up to managers and their team members to evaluate how to meet the overall criteria.
Subjective vs Objective — Subjectivity in the growth framework encourages development of skills that play to an individual’s strengths. Building software products is knowledge work that requires qualities that are not easy to quantify.
Ongoing Conversations — Reduce bias (confirmation, recency, in-group, optimism, pessimism, etc) with ongoing active conversations regarding short and long term career goals rather than once or twice yearly reviews.
Promotions
Promotions at Tradeshift are based on evidence of performance. An engineer is ready to be promoted when he/she has fulfilled the majority of requirements at their current level and is on a clear trajectory to grow into the next level, and expresses a desire to move to the next level. Promotions to the highest levels in the engineering organization, Staff and Principal Engineer, occur after an additional peer and executive review and sign off.
The Future
We are proud of the engineering culture at Tradeshift and will continue to nurture our strengths and improve in other areas. We will continue to evolve as an engineering organization as we change and adapt as a company. The Engineering Growth Framework is only one of the many ways we strive to make Tradeshift an exciting and rewarding place to work at. We just rolled out this iteration of the framework this quarter. Our plan is to gather feedback in the next few quarters from our teams and make necessary adjustments. We are thankful for other companies such as Medium, SoundCloud, Spotify, Songkick, Dropbox, and Square who have published their engineering growth frameworks. They have influenced our decisions on our own framework.
Do you want to be a part of our team? You are in luck — we are hiring! See our open positions across all our locations here.
