First, please read our Careers at Dune page for context

Levels

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:

• 🌎 Scope and Reach
  • What size of problems do they address?
  • Do they work mainly inside a team or across teams or even the company or the wider Dune community?
• 🔧 Technical Expertise (as in e.g. I write and design better systems)
  • What level of fluency do they express in the languages we have at Dune?
  • What level of understanding do they have of different architectures and their tradeoffs?
  • Can they identify systems and tools that are fit for purpose?
  • Do they design for maintainability and robustness (should include testing, ci/cd etc)?
  • What are the actual requirements of this system? Avoids under- and overengineering.
• 🚀 Delivery and Impact
  • Do they frequently contribute design docs, PRs, fix bugs, ship features?
  • Do they advocate for better user experience? Do they use the product? Do they have the customer in mind?
  • Do they hit their objectives and contribute to team OKRS
• 💡 Ownership
  • Do they take ownership of the delivery of projects?
  • Are they comfortable navigating ambiguity?
  • Can they work on limited information?
  • How capable are they of understanding completely new problems?
• 💬  Teamwork and leadership
  • Do they give meaningful reviews on PRs? Are they helpful?
  • Do they mentor less senior engineers?
  • Do they collaborate well with other people?
  • Do they deliver excellent design docs? Or deliver excellent recommendations to docs others have written?

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.