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This documents Artsy's Engineering Ladder. The Engineering Ladder is a framework to help evaluate performance, goals, and compensation for engineers at Artsy. Our ladder was first established and opened in 2015, which you can read more about on our blog.

Since then Artsy has synced up with the Artsy company-wide framework 🔑 for levels and titles and we have added Technical Lead levels to the framework.

This document is open and evolving. We encourage you to submit issues or pull requests to suggest changes and ensure our framework is doing the best it can to help Artsy fairly evaluate compensation and career growth for engineers.

The Engineering Ladder encapsulates two tracks—an individual contributor (IC2–IC8) and manager track (M2–M6). The manager track is available to engineers who have achieved an "IC5 Senior Engineer" level on the individual contributor ladder.

TODO

Individual contributor engineers define a "maker" role at Artsy where a person is responsible for writing code on a regular basis and has no direct reports. As an individual contributor engineer grows at Artsy the scale and impact of the code they write and systems they maintain is expected to increase.

From one level to another, the scope of direct impact gradually increases and so does the sphere of influence. Increased mastery is a necessary condition but isn't sufficient to expand impact.

Note: This ladder is heavily inspired by Better's Technical Career Ladder and Rent the Runway's Engineering Ladder, which we believe have the appropriate levels of specificity to enable meaningful career development conversations.

It can be helpful to maintain a bragging document to really understand the ladder and also to get your work recognized. Julia Evans has put it really well in her blog post explaining that neither you nor your manager will remember everything you did. To help you track your work and also get alignment with your manager on where you are standing in terms of performance you can use this template as a base for your bragging. It also contains some real world bragging examples of fellow Artsy engineers.

To help with the visualisation of the ladder we have created this visual, inspired by honeycomb.io. It is not perfect but it allows for a quick overview of the levels in terms of impact as well as ownership. We wanted to show that each level encompasses the previous levels and there is flexibility in how to interpret and operate on each level based on individual interests. As mentioned in the linked article "...someone might operate at a higher level of ownership in a smaller scope or at a smaller level of ownership at a larger scope, or somewhere in between. Of course, there is value in growing in both dimensions, but it is more common to stretch in one direction or the other at any given point."

Every team at Artsy has a Technical Lead who is part of the Core Team (Product Manager, Technical Lead, Data Analyst, Product Designer and Engineering Manager). The Technical Lead's key responsibilities are:

Taking on a Technical Lead role is a great opportunity for someone to expand their impact (including to expand scope, to achieve team wide impact, or to pave the way towards an Engineering Management career). Throughout their career, an Individual Contributor or an Engineering Manager may swap in and out of this Technical Lead role.

See this document for an expanded set of Tech Lead Responsibilities at Artsy.

A manager’s role at Artsy balances people management responsibilities with team delivery responsibilities. As a people manager, they are responsible for hiring, retaining, growing and managing the performance of their reports. Additionally, they're expected to significantly impact teams' success through their own technical contribution and/or delivery management. Delivery management is broadly defined here as any non-coding activity that will help the team ship faster, with better quality, and with increased impact (for instance: improving team processes, mitigating risks around release planning, facilitating internal and external communication). As an engineering manager grows at Artsy, their scope of impact will increase from one team to multiple teams and from managing ICs to managing ICs and other EMs.