Career Ladder Inspiration · Engineering
Kickstarter's engineering career framework
Engineering career ladder from Kickstarter covering 7 competency areas across 5 levels from Junior Software Engineer to Principal Engineer.
Company Kickstarter|Year 2026|Discipline Engineering|Tracks TBD|License
Scroll horizontally to explore all 5 levels
Clone this templateJunior Software Engineer | Software Engineer | Senior Software Engineer | Staff Engineer | Principal Engineer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Skills Technical Knowledge | Reasonable understanding of core engineering concepts. Focused on expanding understanding and growing as an engineer. Basic understanding of team tools and processes. | Solid understanding of core engineering concepts. Focused on growing as an engineer, learning tools and current processes. Strong background in engineering best-practices like testing, source control, and agile planning. | Master of at least one domain. Aware of industry best practices and trends. Has acquired at least one major skill outside of core coding such as monitoring, documentation, integration testing, visual design, or performance optimization. | Highly knowledgeable in major parts of the technology stack. Technical owner of significant components of the code base. Sustained track record of creating improvements in business-critical systems around stability, performance, and scalability. | Deeply technically savvy. Deeply knowledgeable in major parts of the technology stack. Technical owner of large parts of the code base. Sustained track record of creating major improvements in large business-critical systems. |
Skills Task Execution & Ownership | Capable of taking small well-scoped components and completing them with mentoring and assistance. Works with more senior members to ensure steady progress. | Capable of taking well-scoped components from larger projects and completing them in a reasonable time frame. Constantly making steady progress and knows when to ask for help. Can own independent small-to-medium features from technical design to launch. | Gets a lot done. Responsible for complex tasks and completes them despite roadblocks. Requires very little oversight beyond high-level direction. Can take a complex user story, break it down into sub-tasks, and complete them with relative ease. | Still acting in a very hands-on role. Prolific contributor to both core projects and experimental work. When presented with a complex problem, able to reduce complexity to get more done with less work. | Still acting in a very hands-on role. Prolific contributor to both core projects and experimental work. Consistently able to reduce complexity in order to get more done with less work. This ability to manage and simplify complexity is the hallmark of the Principal Engineer. |
Skills Initiative & Strategic Thinking | Focused on learning engineering principles, tools, and practices with a view to being more self-sufficient. | Focused on learning about a specific component or product sub-area and mastering that component. | Shows initiative beyond knocking tasks off a list. Able to identify and suggest areas of future work. Seeks evidence to support ideas and starts to build cases. Understands the business their code supports and uses this to influence task prioritization. | Provides considerable high-level technical guidance across the team. Can usually anticipate and plan for technical problems. Capable of setting short to medium term strategic direction for part of the technology stack. | Significant strategic vision. Can take a high-level 3-5 year plan and translate that into a strategic technology roadmap. Capable of setting short, medium and long term strategic direction. Identifies areas of critical need based on future growth and develops roadmaps. |
Skills Communication | Learning how to communicate well and deliver feedback. When given unclear requirements, learning how to ask for clarification and identify underlying assumptions. | Communicates well and capable of delivering feedback to peers and manager. Knows how to ask for clarification and ensures assumptions are vetted before work starts to reduce re-work. | Known outside of their core team as a technology leader. Participates extensively in code reviews. Works effectively with non-tech members. Able to identify problems with requirements and help the team course-correct. | Has strong abilities to influence without requiring reporting authority. Facilitates cross-team work and is influential beyond their individual group. Capable of driving groups of disparate interests to decisions. | Has excellent abilities to influence without requiring reporting authority. Effectively facilitates cross-team work and is influential far beyond their individual group. Capable of driving groups of disparate interests to decisions and seeing those decisions through to impact. |
Skills Mentoring & Collaboration | Works with more senior engineers to make steady progress on assigned tasks. | Starts to participate more in the technical design process, often with guidance from senior engineers. By promotion, capable of mentoring interns and new engineers. | Participates extensively in code reviews. Mentors others via code reviews and pairing. Frequently presents at team meetings. | Provides guidance, direction and helps colleagues build and produce better outcomes. May act as leader of a technical team. | Creates architecture that shapes large parts of the business. The impact of their work is felt across the team in the quality of engineering, the ways we write code, and the underlying design of systems. |
Skills Risk & Quality Assessment | Learning how to identify issues and improve skills. Understanding how their work fits into the larger picture. | Understands how their work fits into the larger picture and uses this to identify conflicting requirements to their people leader and product manager. | Has end-to-end responsibility for projects of increasing complexity. Contributes to common code bases and standards. Can identify risks in code, features, and design and communicate them appropriately. Assists in identifying and validating test cases and regression risks. | Has a sustained track record of creating improvements in business-critical systems around stability, performance, and scalability. | Has a track record of anticipating technical problems that will fall out of major products and designing solutions to overcome those problems. |
Skills Scope of Impact | Focused on individual growth and task completion within their team. | Focused on mastering a specific component or sub-area within their team. | Responsible for technical leadership in one or more engineering domains. Maintains plans, documentation and backlogs for technical domains. | Strategic impact over some combination of a large team, a very deep technical problem, and/or a long time horizon. Influential beyond their individual group. | Strategic impact over the team. Creates architecture that shapes large parts of the business. Multiple obvious large technical contributions can be pointed to as originating from this team member. Broad impact across the engineering organization. |
Framework by Kickstarter · Licensed
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