Structure and roles

Within the Product & Services team, Engineers are jointly led by our Technology Lead and Engineering Manager and supported by {role}’Delivery Manager’.

Team roles

• Delivery Manager / Chief of Staff
• Engineering Manager
  • Responsibilities
  • How they work with the team
• Open Source Applications Engineer
  • Outcomes
  • Key responsibilities
  • Necessary qualities
  • Useful qualities
• Open Source Infrastructure Engineer
  • Outcomes
  • Key responsibilities
  • Necessary qualities
  • Useful qualities
• Technology Lead
  • Responsibilities
  • How they interact with other team members

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.

Fluency chart for Engineering

Recently, as a way to add more structure around professional development and to help engineers know better about the shared expectations for each other, we have developed a Fluency chart for Engineering based on the ladder we described in the previous section. This is a tool that will help us in the development of professional development plans for each of our engineers.

Salary bands for Engineeering

We have an internal and engineering-specific salary bands matrix based on the levels outlined in the carreer ladder.

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.