Engineering career framework for Seed/Series A stage startups
Introduction
As engineering leaders, we often grapple with creating clear career paths for our teams. This is particularly difficult at an early-stage startup, where traditional engineering career frameworks [1] from larger companies can be unnecessarily heavy.
During my transition from leading multiple teams at Brex to leading engineering at a seed-stage startup, I noticed that gap firsthand.
Founding engineers wear multiple hats. They're not just writing code and making architectural decisions; they’re also involved in product strategy, recruiting, and customer conversations. A useful framework has to reflect that breadth without recreating the overhead of a larger company.
I started with Brex’s engineering career framework—which, in my biased opinion, is very well designed for their stage—and adapted it for an early-stage startup. The goal was a lightweight tool for managing expectations, evaluating performance, and supporting growth.
The weights reflect an early-stage reality: shipping useful work end to end is the primary expectation, while technical excellence, product direction, and culture describe how that work compounds. Treat them as a starting point, not a universal formula.
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 build a productive and healthy team culture by mentoring individuals, raising the bar in the 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 exceptional, as well as agreeing or disagreeing with the self-assessment, especially 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 performance has met the next level's expectations for a sustained period—usually at least a quarter—and merits a conversation about growth into that level.
- “Strong” means consistently meeting the current level's expectations, with periods of outsized impact.
- “Needs Improvement” means performance does not yet consistently meet the current level's expectations. It should trigger clear examples, specific support, and a timeline for improvement. If the gap persists, the individual and manager should discuss whether the role or organization is the right fit.
Conclusion
The framework is a prompt for a useful career conversation, not a scoring machine. Adapt the weights and examples to the work your company actually needs, and revisit them as the organization grows. The important part is preserving a shared definition of strong performance while giving engineers regular time to step back from daily work and reflect on where they want to grow.
[1] Progression.fyi is a great resource for Career Frameworks from larger companies.