In the past years, our engineers in Kiwi.com felt that they lack proper support in career growth. Many of them felt stuck and they did not know how to move forward with their careers.
This was part of a bigger problem: We were missing comprehensive processes and mechanisms around performance evaluation, promotions, compensation, and general career growth. This was still a legacy of Kiwi.com’s early start-up times when everything, including compensation and promotions, was rather chaotic and organic.
To fix this, we decided to introduce a proper career framework, inspired by some of the big tech guys. We aim to create a fair & transparent environment where our engineers can thrive and grow, limited only by their own abilities.
Core principles
Principle #1: We are all software engineers
When we started, we had 100+ engineering titles. We had Junior Automation Engineers, Senior Infrastructure Platform Engineers, Android Team Leads, and many many others.
We are pushing all that aside. We now have just software engineers. They are assigned different tech levels and those are universal across all of Kiwi.com. For each level, we’re defining explicit expectations in terms of hard skills, soft skills (independence, leadership, communication, etc.) and general impact & usefulness within Kiwi.com.
These expectations are identical for all our engineers on a given level, regardless of their technical domain or role.
For example, all our senior engineers (level 5) are now, besides being technical experts in their areas, also expected to be capable of owning a mid-sized project end-to-end and to have initiative crossing just their team’s boundaries. Thanks to the levels, every engineer will have a clear understanding of where they stand in their career and what the necessary steps to move forward are.