You will never be pigeon-holed here, even as the company grows.

We have recently redefined our engineering career ladder to better support both management and individual contributor (IC) tracks, both of which go up to the director level. It’s common for engineers at other companies to equate career advancement and management, but we don’t see it that way. We don’t want people to think about a move into management as a promotion. At Stitch Fix, we see it as a lateral move and people on the management track should be genuinely interested in managing. We’ve taken our time to define a robust IC track that does not require you to be a manager, but still provides opportunities to climb up to a VP equivalent, which is as high up as out management track goes without being the CTO).

Both of our career paths highlight resourcefulness. We want engineers at Stitch Fix to be motivated and self-guided, which is why so many have been promoted during their time at the company. While there are many individuals we’d love to highlight, Rachel Bobbins is a great example of someone who has leveraged her skills to take on new challenges. We will not hand you a set of tasks and a backlog at Stitch Fix, but we will definitely provide ample support and opportunities for you to develop your career in the way that best suits you.

As part of our “careers, not jobs” philosophy, we want to provide you with leadership and management opportunities if you identify it as an area you want to grow.

For strong individual contributors, this means demonstrating technical leadership by example, and providing invaluable coaching in pull request reviews. For developers on the people management track, this can mean having direct reports or being a squad lead for a couple sprints.

Ali Dinani was a co-op student intern who has risen to be our Director of Growth. During this journey, he finished school while working part-time at CareGuide, and then joined as a full-time engineer. In the last two years, he has taken on more responsibility and leadership. Charing Wong is currently our Director of Product, but started as an engineer shipping features, all while demonstrating mastery of product management. Lakhveer Jajj started with us right out of university, growing his technical skills, rising to be a Senior Engineer, and is now leading us through significant technical challenges as a Director of Engineering.

Learn more about our team!

We’ve learned that without the opportunity to move up in a company an employee will look other places.

Making sure our employees continue to grow is important to us. It’s an ongoing conversation you will have with your managers and something we don’t take lightly. We make sure each person has a personalized set of long-term goals for their career path and work with them to make them happen. As we grow, you will grow alongside us. At WineDirect you can start as a Junior Developer and make your way up into a leading role or management position. We look for passion in what you do and the initiative to get things done well.Inspiring innovation in other members of the team is also looked upon very highly. We have also seen front-end developers transition into back-end developers, and customer support reps into project managers. We are open to change and the needs of our employees.

When you grow, we grow.

You are a plank-holder in this company and we are invested in growing our own. Our ideal candidates are passionate about self-awareness and personal growth. Andy started as a full-stack engineer and has since been promoted to Product Manager, thanks to his drive to partake in new research and work on other projects (while still getting his primary work done).

We want to work with great people who are excited about self-improvement both in their personal and professional lives. If we know someone has a certain interest or passion, we’ll do our best to make sure to involve them on a relevant feature or project. We are 100% bought-in and will always invest in the people who are bought-in, too.

We believe in taking risks on people and developing careers from within.

We take risks on people, because we know that as an employee, you are taking a huge risk on us, too. This is why we welcome hires from non-traditional backgrounds, and why we’re open to contract-to-hire arrangements. We don’t believe job descriptions are dogma. If you’re excited about what we’re building but think only a few items in a job description apply to you, we encourage you to apply. Amanda, one of our co-founders, adds, “I want to emphasize this, especially to any women who are considering applying for a role. Study after study shows that women will wait until they feel 100% qualified for a position before applying. Please don’t do that with us.”

We’ve cemented our belief in promoting from within at past companies, where we’ve helped interns and junior hires take on more responsibilities and grow into more senior roles. We want new members of our team to believe they can grow at Compound.

Four out of our seven engineering managers were promoted internally.

In general, we think companies under-invest in coaching, training, and growing people. There’s an enormous amount of untapped potential in people who have intrinsic intellectual curiosity and raw cognitive horsepower. We find those people, invest in them, and watch them grow at an incredible rate.

As one of many examples, Bindu Mohan was hired as a Senior Engineer and was recently promoted to Staff Engineer. She is currently our only Staff Engineer, and that is the highest IC engineering level we have defined at Mode. We also support those who are interested in a managerial track. In engineering alone, four out of our seven people managers were promoted from within.

We provide a $2,000 yearly educational stipend for folks to stretch themselves during their time at Mode, even if it means you’ll outgrow the role you were initially hired for. We also use our own version of Medium’s engineering performance framework, Snowflake, to make it crystal clear what career progression looks like for all engineers. Compensation bands are tied to titles and levels, and levels are determined by Snowflake points, which are completely transparent. If you want to know how you’re doing or how you can grow, we have no secrets.

Everyone has opportunities for promotion, regardless of years of experience.

With a company growing this fast, new space is constantly created for you to advance in your career. When Faiz, our compliance foundations manager, started looking for new opportunities, he was specifically targeting companies that would allow him to grow his career. After his interview, Faiz remembered thinking it was “evident that coaching and career development were at the core of the company’s culture, which made [him] incredibly excited at the prospect of working at Samsara”.

Fast forward to early 2018: Faiz joined the team, successfully completed his starter projects, and was then paired with another engineer to rearchitect the process of allowing drivers to select their vehicle via the Samsara mobile app. While the problem statement may seem straightforward, “one of the core features of our mobile app is that it must work while disconnected from the internet, which makes enforcing mutual exclusion very difficult.” After 3 months of hard work and very methodical QA, the project was successfully launched in June 2018 and Faiz was promoted to Team Lead for the newly formed Compliance Foundations team.

His story doesn't stop there. As Faiz explains, “I helped the team work through a series of commits for the largest compliance customer to date, wrote technical docs for new features within compliance, and helped onboard new hires to the team.” Through his dedication and hard work, he was then given the added responsibility of Engineering Manager of the Compliance Foundations team. Go Faiz!

In order to encourage our culture of promoting from within, Faiz hopes to pay it forward. He tries “to keep a constant conversation on career growth goals for everyone on [his] team, so that they can have a clear, actionable path forward.” He has weekly and monthly growth discussions with each team member to chat about their trajectory — with his main focus being his team’s professional development.

This mentality doesn’t start or end with Faiz and his team. We’re proud to have a culture that takes career development seriously, home-growing a diverse leadership team.

Zoe (left) and Deion (right) working together on running queries to get historical AG45 check-in logs

Flexport is great because of the people, so we make sure to take care of each other!

Most ideas and initiatives drive from the ground up, and we regularly promote and empower those who exemplify our values.

Take Will Humphreys-Cloutier, for example. When he joined the engineering team in January 2017, he saw that despite all of the cargo we were moving around the world, we didn’t have a carbon offset program. Together with Susy Schöneberg from the business side, he drove Flexport's partnership with the Carbonfund.org Foundation. They built carbon emissions reporting, and provided a way for our customers to sign up.

After that, he made it possible for Flexport to model and coordinate the allocation of cargo onto carrier ships. He wrote detailed design docs, mentored his teammates, and acted as the glue between product, business, and engineering. He has since been promoted to Staff Engineer and then Engineering Manager for the Ocean Automation Team.

Flexport.org started as a hackathon project, but has since spun out into a huge business where our clients also join the mission to make global supply chains more efficient and transparent. We’re now building out a separate engineering team for Flexport.org.

We want to hire people who will go on to become future leaders.

While we are currently act as engineers, product managers, designers, or sales people, we view everyone, including our new hires, as potential team leaders, directors, VPs, or even CTO. The opportunities will be there as we grow and we are intentionally hiring people who can be future leaders. We strongly believe it's often better to promote from within versus bring in external hires. We want leaders that have grown up in our company’s culture and understand it better than any outsider can.

We always prefer to reward top performers over bringing in a new hire.

Top performers are rewarded with increased responsibility, compensation, and promotions. Our Director of Analytics started out as a junior developer on our team. Our VP of Technology was previously our Director of Technology, and before that, a senior front-end developer on our team. We also promoted a front-end developer to become a designer and front-end lead.

There are many examples of internal promotions at Dev.xyz, and we take great pride in being able support individual growth alongside team growth. We don’t believe in monitoring the number of lines of code you write or number of tickets you completed. Instead, we involve our developers from project start to finish. By allowing our team members to estimate how long tasks will take, and reviewing the product and timeline of development we are able to help developers hone their communication and estimation skills. Frequent code reviews, feedback sessions, and annual reviews all help guide employees through their career.

Meet our dev.xyz team here!

You don't need permission to own something at Wove.

One of our absolute favorite things is when an employee joins Wove, identifies some whitespace, and then reaches out to grab it. A good example is when Armaan joined our team as a Software Engineer. At the time, we had no PMs or formal product owner of any kind, so he immediately took this role for himself. Armaan took ownership of our product roadmap and started making decisions about how our product should evolve over time. He also made himself an indispensable resource for the rest of the engineering team by helping us be organized, keeping projects on track, and constantly challenging our assumptions. Less than a year after joining the company as an engineer, he was promoted to VP of Product & Engineering.

Our hope for every new hire is that they'll impress us with their level of ownership and execution. One of the most important responsibilities of our management team is to recognize these people, and acknowledge their contributions through promotions, raises, bonuses, equity bumps, and beyond.

We believe our best leaders grow, flourish, and emerge from within the team.

These individuals have the most relevant experience, and frankly deserve to advance if they want. This philosophy is in-line with our other value of being “Committed to personal growth.”

We hire team members with tremendous potential for growth, and present them with the opportunity to advance their careers without any speed limits. It doesn’t make sense that you have to wait 4 years to be considered “senior”. If you can achieve the same level of expertise and experience in 2 years, even more reason why you deserve to take on responsibilities of a senior engineer.