Structure and roles

Engineering is led by our Technology Lead and Engineering Manager. They define our technical priorities at any moment, and communicate these priorities to others on the team.

This team operates similarly to a Site Reliability Engineering team. It focuses most development efforts on improving the cloud infrastructure that supports our partner communities, rather than developing new features and technology for the use-cases we support. It balances a combination of operations and development focused around our cloud infrastructure.

They are expected to coordinate with other leads within 2i2c in order to ensure that our technical priorities reflect our organizational priorities for impact.

Team roles

• Engineering Manager
  • How it fits into our organizational structure
  • Key responsibilities
  • Useful qualities to have
  • Salary rationale
  • References
  • Acknowledgements
• Open Source Infrastructure Engineer
  • Key responsibilities
  • Necessary qualities
  • Useful qualities
• Engineering Project Manager
• Technology Lead
  • Responsibilities

Career Ladders

We take heavy inspiration from two open-source career ladders:

• https://www.engineeringladders.com/

• https://career-ladders.dev/

Both ladders propose different workflows although we can identify some similarities we take advantage of. We have adapted pieces from both ladders as follows:

1. We use Axes and Levels as described in the Introduction page at https://www.engineeringladders.com/

2. Our Developer track is based on https://www.engineeringladders.com/Developer.html

3. Our Engineering Manager track is based on https://www.engineeringladders.com/EngineeringManager.html, although we added an additional EM4 level described below.

4. The Tech Lead is a role that can be played by anyone in the team at different levels: https://career-ladders.dev/engineering#tech-lead. This is a substantial difference from the dedicated Tead Lead ladder proposed by engineeringladders.com. Our existing Technology Lead role represents a Tech Lead with high seniority (D4 and above).

5. We also introduce steps for each numbered level as a way to build salary bands and enhance the granularity. It is expected that engineers advance step by step before entering a new level, although a whole-level jump may exist if there are enough reasons to justify it.

6. Steps are evaluated every 6 months for 1-3 levels and every year for 4-7 levels, whereas numbered levels are evaluated every year for 1-3 levels and every 2 years for 4-7 levels.

We have an internal and engineering-specific salary bands matrix associated with each level at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D_-RzXhyWw8jFs7KQQXKVRV4VrmOyXjQni2UTnk1044/edit#gid=0.

EM4

• Evangelizes: researches, creates proofs of concept and introduces new technologies to the team

• Owns: owns the production operation and monitoring of the system and is aware of its SLAs

• Coordinates: manages the team members’ career, expectations, performance and level of happiness

• Challenges: adjusts the team processes, listening to feedback and guiding the team through the changes

• Team: makes an impact on the whole team, not just on specific parts of it

Membership

Our engineering team is listed on our list of team members.