This career ladder aims to provide a framework helping the members of the Matter design systems at Castor with their personal growth.
- Level 1: Task-focused. Can produce and deliver a well defined project
- Level 2: Epic-focused. Can independently own a new project and the communication with other around it
- Level 3: Project-focused. Can handle a series of project in parallel, and broadly contribute to the improvement of our products
- Level 4: Team-focused. Can anticipate early possible roadblocks, improve and facilitate other people's work, and can steer the direction of their main projects
- Level 5: Organization-focused. Defines the design or technical culture, helps other people to develop and grow their profile, creates new opportunities for the company
Area of Influence: Task
Impact: Complete tasks by writing, testing and documenting code.
Degree of Ownership: first-reponder focusing on bug fixing and patches in their project.
Skills:
- Broad knowledge of engineering concepts and processes
- Can produce and deliver well-defined and subdivided tasks
- Debugs and fixes issues in development, test, and production
- Develops package management, source control, editors, or test-driven development skills
- Contributes to team activities and collaborates within the team to solve problems
Area of Influence: Epic
Impact: Designs, develops, ships and maintains features with guidance
Degree of Ownership: Responsible for the entire lifecycle of their code from development to release, including potential fixes and improvements.
Skills:
- Constantly writes and delivers correct and clean quality code with guidance
- Works with autonomy and makes steady progress on tasks
- Recognises when to ask for help, how to get unblocked, and when to shift focus on other tasks.
- Owns a small-to-medium project from technical design and architecture through completion
- Helps and supports the work outside of their main area of focus
Area of Influence: Project
Impact: Independently designs, develops, ships and maintains projects and complex features
Degree of Ownership: Responsible for the entire lifecycle of a project including technical design, development, deployment and the collaboration with other teams.
Skills:
- Owns an area of our codebases and/or a large project
- Develops a high profiency in one of more technical areas
- Delivers quickly with minimal directions or oversight
- Understands how to make sure that their work contributes directly to the business
- Makes well-reasoned architecture decisions and tradeoffs in their area
- Can work in other areas of the business with guidance from owners
- Knows how to leverage team work to overcome roadblocks
- Mentors junior engineers
- Participates in the interviewing process of new team members
Area of Influence: Team
Impact: Expert in one or more technical areas. Contributes to large multi-person projects or projects involving a diverse set of teams.
Degree of Ownership: Estimates tasks, assesses risk and manages the timeline and priorities for the team.
Skills:
- Owns a complete service or a collection of services
- Involves business knowledge in technical decisions
- Technical knowledge recognised by other teams
- Anticipates roadblocks and makes architectural decisions to avoid those
- Facilitates cross-team work and the efficiency of colleagues
- Creates improvements in stability, performance and scalability across services
- Reduces the complexity of projects, services, and processes in order to help teams to deliver more while doing less
- Impacts the short and medium-term strategic technical direction
- Promotes their work and the work made by their team externally via talks, blog posts, podcasts, etc.
Area of Influence: Organisation
Impact: Leads large and complex areas impacting a diverse set of teams inside and outside the Product and Engineering teams.
Degree of Ownership: Influences the technical strategy for the whole organisation and collaborates across teams and disciplines to solve problems and technical debates.
Skills:
- Mentors every technical member of the team
- Develops a long-term strategy for complete and critical areas of the business
- Impacts the architecture and the technology solutions organisation-wide
- Delivers large systems involving one or more teams’ contribution
- Builds systems, authoring tools, policies or patterns
- Breaks down complex problems into solutions
- Embraces uncertainty when designing new architectures and projects
- Leads conversation internally about broad aspects of the technology
- Identifies growth opportunities for their team and the technology at Castor