Engineering career framework for Seed/Series A stage startups
Introduction
As engineering leaders, we often grapple with the challenge of creating clear career paths for our teams. This becomes particularly complex in the early-stage startup environment, where the traditional engineering career frameworks[1] from larger tech companies don't quite fit the bill.
During my transition from leading multiple teams at Brex to my current role as leading engineering at a seed-stage startup, I noticed a significant gap. The comprehensive career frameworks that worked well for larger organizations felt unnecessarily heavy for Seed/Series A stage startups.
Founding engineers at early-stage startups wear multiple hats. They're not just writing code and making architectural decisions, they’re also actively involved in product strategy, recruiting, and often interfacing directly with customers. Additionally, there’s not much (any?) overhead that they have to navigate as with a larger company, and thus, the traditional career frameworks simply don’t work for startups.
This led me to start with Brex’s engineering career framework (which, in my biased opinion, is very well done for their stage) and adapt it into something more suitable for early-stage startups. The goal was to create a lightweight yet effective tool for managing expectations, evaluating performance, and fostering growth for founding engineers. Here’s the framework in its entirety.
Levels and Expectations
| Area | SE I | SE II | Senior | Staff |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Getting Things Done (50%) | You consistently ship* well-defined projects (<2 wk scope) with limited support from your team | You consistently ship* well-defined projects (2-6 wk scope) with very limited support from your team | You consistently ship* ambiguous projects (6 wk+ scope) autonomously with little to no support from your team. | You are accountable for critical initiatives across the company, with clear impact |
| Technical Excellence (20%) | You uphold the team’s technical quality bar (enforcing good PR descriptions, following incident process, clear and concise technical design documentation, etc.) | You improve the team’s technical quality bar with limited support from senior+ engineers. | You proactively land improvements that raise our technical quality bar and operations. | You are accountable for the company’s technical quality bar and operations. |
| Product & Direction (15%) | You propose and implement smaller scoped improvements and/or delighters across our product or technical stack (eg., setting up synthetic tests, improving a table’s UX, etc.) | You proactively incorporate customer feedback as improvements to our product. You successfully fill in any gaps across various functions. | You are able to bring a strategic view of how our technical systems should evolve to meet customer needs. You help define team/company metrics and are a voice of the customer. | You are accountable for the technical and product vision and strategy across the company. |
| Culture (15%) | You are a positive team-player and clearly evangelize our values. | You contribute to building a productive and healthy team culture. | You play a significant role in building a productive and healthy team culture (eg., mentoring individuals, raising the bar in hiring process, leading by example, etc.) | You build and are accountable for a productive and healthy engineering culture. |
Our definition of “ship” includes:
- Outlining and building alignment on end-to-end customer journey.
- Validating that the proposed product solution meets the customer’s needs.
- Proposing and validating technical solutions and building buy-in within the team.
- Giving accurate scopes/estimates, as well as expected timelines, adhering to them, as well as communicating upward and outward proactively (eg., keeping Linear up-to-date daily, posting Linear updates, flagging risks to your manager, etc.)
- Executing on the plan with a very high quality bar (i.e., thorough end-to-end testing before merging PRs, adding unit tests wherever reasonable, responding to incidents and minimizing customer impact if/when things break as a result of your changes).
- Measuring impact of your work, and how it improved customer’s experience.
Check-ins
Every quarter, we do a lightweight performance “check-in” consisting of a
- Self-review by the individual (no more than 400 words)
- 360 feedback by 2-3 closest peers (limited to 5 sentences each)
- Recap by their manager highlighting accomplishments that were truly exceptions, as well agreeing/disagreeing with self assessment, esp. around areas of growth (no more than 500 words)
Engineers usually spend less than an hour total across self review and 360 feedbacks, followed by a 30 min 1-1 with their manager recapping the outcomes. The process enforces strict word limits to ensure that we get the highest ROI of our time invested in this process.
Ratings
- “Exceptional” means that the performance is at the next level for a sustained period of time (i.e., at least a quarter), and usually merits a conversation to grow the individual to the next level within the next few cycles.
- “Strong” means that the performance is Strong and Expected, with periods of outsized impact.
- “Needs Improvement” means that the person is unable to succeed in their role at Complete. It’s likely that the individual would be a better fit in a different organization (ie. larger engineering orgs with more hands-on mentorship and growth). This usually merits a deeper conversation and reflection by both the individual, as well as their manager, on how we can set up the person to have a successful career in tech.
Conclusion
This lightweight engineering career framework for early-stage startups has four key areas: Getting Things Done (50%), Technical Excellence (20%), Product & Direction (15%), and Culture (15%). It defines clear expectations across four levels (SE I to Staff) and implements quarterly performance check-ins through concise self-reviews, peer feedback, and manager recaps. This streamlined approach is all you need at the early stage. While founding engineers are cut from a different cloth, I've noticed they deeply value these regular check-ins as opportunities to step back from daily work and reflect on their career trajectory.
[1] Progression.fyi is a great resource for Career Frameworks from larger companies.