Introducing Affirm’s Career Framework for Engineering
One of Affirm’s core values is “People come first”, which we live out not only in the way that we conduct business and treat our customers, but also through continuous investment in the professional growth of our employees. Although internally we’ve gone through a few iterations of our career framework for engineering growth, we’re pleased to be publishing it publicly for the first time today to share our approach to career development for engineers. We hope that publishing the framework provides greater transparency to prospective candidates as to how they will be evaluated for level of impact both during the interview process and once they start at Affirm, as well as how they can expect to grow within the company. We also hope that the framework proves useful to other engineering teams as they think through their career structures, just as we’ve drawn inspiration both from teams that have published their own frameworks and from engineers that have brought their experiences with such frameworks with them to Affirm.
This is the first of two posts that will provide some background and context for the career framework, first describing how we use the framework, outlining its overall structure and our thinking behind the design. The next post will share how we think about career growth for senior engineers along with an explanation of how this manifests in the framework.
Why is this important?
Although we encourage all Affirmers to take ownership over their personal growth, we recognize that Affirm shares responsibility for our employees’ careers. Affirm provides the training, encouragement, mentorship, and opportunities, but it’s up to individuals to steer their course and make the most of their experience at the company. Our career framework is a guide for engineers and their managers to have professional development conversations, including where they should focus their attention for continued growth. It also serves as a common reference point for expectations in order to align on day-to-day feedback. Finally, in keeping with our company value of “No fine print”, the framework is a way for us to be transparent with our engineers about how their performance will be evaluated, as well as with prospective candidates about how their candidacy will be assessed.
The Framework
The career framework describes the capabilities and expectations of engineers at Affirm. These expectations are grouped into levels of expanding scope and impact and presented incrementally; the expectations at each level include all of those at the previous level. Although the level descriptions are used as a rubric for promotion decisions, they are not a checklist, but rather a grouping of common skills that are frequently necessary to have the impact commensurate with performance at each level. By avoiding checklists we want to encourage engineers to follow the spirit of the framework without overly focusing on the exact wording, while also leaving open the possibility to demonstrate impact in a way that we haven’t previously considered. Critically, the levels are an overlay to understand actual skills and knowledge. The level tells us about an individual engineer’s expected capabilities; it does not bestow capabilities. As such it is intentionally a lagging indicator of a, hopefully, moving target, not a leading indicator designed to signal a bestowed honorific.
The framework has two career tracks, one for people managers and another for individual contributors (ICs), starting after the Senior Software Engineer level. This gives engineers the opportunity to advance their careers and take on greater scope and impact without moving into people management. We want engineers to consider management roles because they are interested in people management, not because it’s the only option available for advancement. Similarly, moving into management is not considered a promotion as it usually does not include a change in level: engineers move from their level on the IC track to the level on the management track that most accurately reflects their expected scope and impact, often the one corresponding to their previous IC level. We fully expect to, and already do, have engineers who move between the tracks in both directions, sometimes multiple times throughout their career.
In addition to the levels, the capabilities and expectations included in our framework are organized into four categories that are shared across the career frameworks for all functions at the company. We call these the pillars of success at Affirm: Take Ownership, Execute, Collaborate, and Build Teams. All of the levels in both tracks touch on each of these pillars in some way, although to varying degrees and in different forms. Building teams is expected to occupy a lot more of a manager’s focus than an individual contributor’s, and execution for a Principal Software Engineer looks very different from that of a new grad. The pillars are also used to present a set of skills and behaviors that we value as a company, which can be viewed as level-independent threads that run throughout the framework. These skills and behaviors form a baseline set of expectations for job performance that manifest in different ways depending on role and level. They are another useful tool for engineers and their managers to identify strengths and potential areas for improvement.
Finally, we have made a conscious decision with our framework to explicitly include behaviors that promote diversity and inclusion on our team. Our goal is both to clarify the expectations that we have of team members to create an inclusive working environment and to recognize those that spend considerable working hours on these initiatives. We feel it is important to incorporate these points throughout the framework, rather than in a standalone section, in order to give them equal weight to our core job expectations. Their wording and inclusion in the level descriptions reflect our view that the responsibility to create a diverse and inclusive workplace falls on all employees, but especially people managers due to their outsized influence over hiring decisions and team culture.
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