Kensho’s framework aims to expand growth opportunities, provide transparency into philosophy & process, and to provide clearly defined paths. For Engineering specifically, we have codified an IC technical leadership path, we have provided recognizable levels & titles that make sense for our engineering function and we have outlined specific skills (i.e. actions one can practice) to further your success.
While the primary focus of the career tracks is on skills development, behavioral & Kensho cultural expectations are baked in. There are also a few call-outs to increased scope in the progression (e.g. from manager to director or senior II to staff eng) over purely skills growth.
The first inflection point in your career at Kensho and in many other tech companies, is at the senior software engineer level. There are several growth options for a senior software engineer, each with its own unique growth areas:
- Management requires a focus on people leadership where your internal definition of success is the success of your team.
- Staff-plus requires technical leadership that builds off your success as a technical leader on a team and reputation as a subject matter expert. There is no expectation of senior software engineer II needing to seek out Staff-plus opportunities.
- A tech lead role requires product leadership where the focus is on guiding implementation and informing feasibility to ensure we achieve our desired product goals.
A career track (also referred to as a job family) groups competencies, skills, and behavioral expectations which are critical to a role, in order of progression, from entry to advanced levels. At Kensho, we have tracks for roles found within each job function. Multiple roles may align under one career track if the work requires similar training, skills, knowledge and expertise. Employees are aligned with the track that matches about 70% or more of their day-to-day work responsibilities.
Tracks listed A-Z:
- Individual Contributor - Machine Learning Engineering
- Individual Contributor - Research Scientist
- Individual Contributor - Site Reliability Engineering
- Individual Contributor - Software Engineering
- People Leader - Engineering
Coming soon:
- Individual Contributor - Applied Scientist
Inspiration for the actionable tone and competencies came, in part, from the leveling matrix created by Bradford Fults (@h3h) and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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