Our engineering levels serve as the guiding compass to career laddering within the engineering community. They blend our overall rule of thumbs across the company concerning levels with engineering specific traits & impact.

The callouts below reason about it in simpler terms, and tie the level's concept together in the example of Sarah Drasner’s great book.

C1+ (~CTO)

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Level of zoom: operating on the Payflip org of the future and making vision & strategy clear

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CTO levels

C1 (~Principal)

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You're creating systems that scale beyond yourself. You're no longer helping people operate like you, you're helping them where they are. The majority of your activities are related to enabling the success of everyone around you.

Level of zoom: operating on the current Payflip org and moving it forward technically

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🌟 Traits

• Your success is measured in how others move forward and are successful rather than your individual perspective
• You operate as a trusted advisor the CTO, coordinating our engineering team and helping execute on the vision
• You play a pivotal role in the growth of our engineering team from mentoring, hiring, to determining missing expertise

💢 The impact you make

• You shape the technical direction of the company spotting steps we need to make in order to scale or bring technical excellence. You own the technical roadmap
• In unclear discovery phases you kickstart squads or big initiatives and make it clear for the team what technical success looks like in from MVP to release to long term success