First, please read our Careers at Dune page for context

Levels

Level (IC) Individual Contributor Level (MN) Manager
IC1 Engineer
IC2 Engineer
IC3 Engineer (Senior) MN3 Engineering Team Lead
IC4 Engineer (Staff) MN4 Engineering Manager
IC5 Engineer (Principal) MN5 Director of Engineering
MN6 VP of Engineering
MN7 Chief

NB: IC1 for engineering maps to L3 in standard tech-industry levelling. IC1 is not entry-level at Dune, IC1 engineers still have experience but are developing.

Introduction

The aim of this document is to introduce a simple career path for Dune that provides clear expectations to engineers. This is Dune’s leveling framework*.* It is different from other organizations, and the expectations are different. It’s for a company of size 60, not of size 5000.

We don’t want to over engineer a career framework, so we’ve kept it quite broad.

This framework is not a promotion checklist for your role; rather, it’s a guide designed to help you discover what impact you can create at your current level, and what your impact could look like at the next level.

For now we have focused on the IC track. To create this initial draft we’ve asked the question: how do Dune’s expectations of engineers change as they grow in their careers.

By moving levels, we expect engineers to improve or expand in:

An engineer can move between levels when they can demonstrate that they can cover all or most of the competencies of that level consistently over a period of 12 months. Performance reviews are used to identify gaps and furthermore define plans to help them in learning & demonstrating these gaps to advance in their career.

There are many ways engineers can add value at Dune; we rely on our managers to clearly articulate how an engineer is meeting the scope and impact of each level, and that they are aligning with our technical principles and core values as a company.