Affirm’s Career Framework for Engineering, Part 2
This is the second of two blog posts that we’re publishing alongside our career framework for engineering growth at Affirm. You can read the first blog post here. In this post we discuss how we’ve tailored the framework specifically for senior engineers and managers, as well as how we think about evolving the framework in the future.
Features for Senior Engineers
As Affirm has grown and matured as an organization, we’ve recognized the need to invest in the development of our growing cadre of senior engineers and engineering managers. For the latest iteration of our framework, we therefore wanted to include some tools aimed at senior engineers as well as to expound on our philosophy for manager growth and impact.
Our belief is that as you grow as an engineer, particularly as an individual contributor, there are increasingly varied paths to greater scope and impact. For example, the variability in behaviors leading to impact is greater among Staff level engineers than it is among junior engineers. While the impact of engineers operating within a specific level should be similar, and there is a lot of overlap in the sets of skills commonly employed to have that impact, the range of skill combinations, operating models, and means by which you deliver impact widens as you advance through the levels.
An important aspect of your growth, therefore, is to chart your own path to attaining higher impact by leveraging your individual strengths and interests. Archetypes for Technical Leadership are a useful tool that we’ve included in our framework for identifying such paths. Archetypes provide examples of behavioral patterns typically found in engineers operating at a particular level. They are, however, just that: examples, and it’s common for highly effective engineers to employ behaviors from multiple archetypes as required by situations they face. In the same way that the skill descriptions at each level should not be read as a checklist, the archetypes should not be read as a script to be followed blindly. Nor is the list included in the framework by any means exhaustive: there may be many other archetypes for success. The examples provided are illustrative of a handful of ways that you can develop your own skills to have a greater impact. Used well, the archetypes are a boon to inclusion by providing engineers with diverse backgrounds and modes of thinking common patterns for success, but if treated too much as a framework on their own they might become stereotypes that people are lumped into.
Although we’ve always been clear about the responsibilities of people managers to their teams, earlier iterations of our career framework were fuzzy on the differences in impact between management levels beyond team size. There are a couple of ways that we address this in our latest framework. One is to recognize that, especially as our organization grows, managing up and across the organization to peers and senior leaders is just as important as managing down to direct reports. So while a line manager may run a team that has a single clear stakeholder and whose work is typically fairly self-contained, more senior managers will be responsible for more complex initiatives that require working with multiple stakeholders, with an important stakeholder external to Affirm, or across engineering and other functional team boundaries.
Outsized impact as a result of the nature of the team or manager’s work can also be reflective of a manager’s seniority. This could arise from the ability to make a direct impact on a first-tier company goal by working in a particularly high-leverage area (e.g. our core underwriting system), or working on foundational technology that acts as a productivity multiplier for large swaths of our engineering team. Furthermore, senior managers tend to have a large cultural impact on engineering, and can effectively represent the team to the rest of the company and often externally. They need to show that they are model Affirm citizens across all pillars of success, and work towards the success not only of their slice of the org chart but also the entire engineering organization. Examples of this kind of impact include: organizing effective and successful initiatives around code quality, architecture, or another engineering goal, solving a major issue engineering has with another department, or successfully organizing a significant improvement in an internal process such as a recruiting process or a diversity and inclusion initiative.
Future Work
Our career framework is a living document. Just as we’ve made modifications to it in the past to reflect the changing needs of our organization, we expect to refine the framework over time as our team grows and evolves and we seek to recognize all the ways that the people on our team are having an impact. We hope that these posts and our framework help shed light on how we think about professional growth for engineers, and that they might be useful to other companies who are working out these questions for themselves.
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