Navigating the Startup Engineering World: A Guide to Career Paths and Opportunities
Hi there! My name is Abhishek Jain and I'm the Director of Engineering at Fyle. If you're reading this, you're probably wondering what kind of career paths Fyle has. Well, let me tell you, it's been quite the journey figuring it all out.
When I first joined Fyle (which feels like a million years ago but was really only about 6.5 years), we were a tiny team with just a few simple roles. I was a Member of Technical Staff, and above me was the CTO. But as we started to grow like crazy (seriously, it feels like we double in size every 6-9 months), we had to invent new roles on the fly.
Recently, I had the fun task of redefining all of our engineering roles and career paths to better fit the needs of the business and the strengths of our amazing team. It wasn't easy, but I started by asking myself the important questions:
What is a role?
How many roles should there be?
What is expected in each role?
How does one know if they want to take the Individual contributor’s path or try out the managerial career track?
And most importantly, how does one climb the corporate ladder and become the boss of all bosses (just kidding, but seriously, how does one get promoted)?
One thing I've learned by working in startups is
Change is the only constant. The sooner you embrace it, the faster you grow.
We discussed some of these questions with our engineering managers, and each of them had valuable insights based on their own experiences and what had worked for them as they progressed from interns to individual contributors to engineering managers.
At a high level, there are two career paths:
Individual contributor path (IC)
Managerial path
Through my experience in startups, I've learned that the key to success is a team that cares deeply about what they're building and is willing to go above and beyond to make it happen. That's why at Fyle, we have a flexible career path that accommodates the diverse needs of our team members as we grow.
Defining a checklist of things needed for each role can be challenging, as the needs of each team member and role vary greatly. That's why we have expectations listed for each role and band. These expectations are a useful guide, but they don't cover everything that is expected of each person or role.
We’re a team of 40 engineers (32 Full time and 8 interns), given our relatively small size, the following roles work really well for us
IC
Member of Technical Staff (MTS)
Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS)
Principal Member of Technical Staff (PMTS)
Manager
Engineering Manager (EM)
Senior Engineering Manager (SEM)
Director of Engineering (DoE)
Each role has different bands which indicate progress, for example, MTS-1, MTS-2, SMTS-1 and so on.
At Fyle, we believe that both individual contributors and managers can make valuable contributions to the company, and we offer similar pay bands for both paths. We expect team members to perform well in their current roles before considering them for promotion. If someone consistently demonstrates the ability to handle more responsibility by "playing at the next level" for two consecutive quarters, they may be ready to move up the ladder.
Exploring the Managerial Track
For those of you who are interested in management but aren't quite sure if it's the right fit for you, we've got a solution! You can try out the managerial track without fully diving in by starting with mentoring. Many of our managers started out as individual contributors (ICs) at Fyle, and a lot of them began by mentoring one intern, then multiple interns, before eventually moving on to manage full-time team members.
This is a great way to test the waters and see if management is the right fit for you. It gives you the opportunity to act like a manager without the full burden of responsibility. And who knows, you might just find that you love it! So if you're interested in trying out the managerial track, consider starting with mentoring. It could be the perfect first step on your journey to the top.
Career paths
We have published our career path doc publicly, I hope this will help both engineers and the companies to bring some structure to different engineering roles.
So there you have it - a brief overview of the engineering career paths at Fyle. It's been a wild ride figuring it all out, but I'm confident that we have a clear and defined set of paths for our team members to follow. Good luck on your journey to the top (or wherever it is you want to go)!
I'd like to give a special shoutout to a few folks who played a crucial role in figuring out the roles and responsibilities:
Siva (CTO)
Aiyush Dhar (Engineering Manager)
Gokul K (Engineering Manager)
Shwetabh Kumar (Engineering Manager)
Sumanth Avadhani (Engineering Manager)
Vikas Prasad (Engineering Manager)
Vaishnavi Mohan (Engineering Manager)
Please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or on email (ajain@fylehq.com
)