Mercari Engineering Ladder

The Engineering Ladder was created for Mercari engineers to have a consistent culture and overall alignment as an engineering organization.

This is a framework for visualizing and evaluating the behavior and competency of engineers.

The Mercari Engineering Ladder is only one piece of a larger initiative to promote Mercari engineer's continuous improvement and career development. It should be used as a support tool in addition to regular management practices like 1:1s between engineers and their managers, regular feedback and conversations about alignment and growth, quarterly goal setting and bi-annual performance reviews.

Purpose

1. Have a holistic and objective framework for performance reviews and feedback.
2. Give engineers a career perspective and a clear guideline for growth.
3. Achieve consistency on engineering culture and standards, not only inside Mercari but also in our hiring process.

How to read and interpret the ladder

The expectations described in this ladder should be the basis for self-assessment, feedback, and calibration. Using ladder as a basis, managers and members can be on the same page.

Engineers are able to tell which competencies they possess, or not, based on the ladder. This should be helpful to make improvement plan or to demonstrate their competencies.

Some expectations won't fit 100% for all engineering roles. For example, SRE engineers may not necessarily deal with CS inquiries directly; not every engineer will be placed in on-call tasks to handle incidents. Therefore the ladder should not be taken literally, and instead members should consider only parts that are applicable to their work. The most important thing is to align the expectations with your manager or counterpart.

Grades

The Engineering Ladder describes the expectations with regards to an engineer’s competencies and behaviors for an assigned grade. There are 8 grades of expectations (however, we have only 6 grade descriptions so far)

We understand that growth is not linear or streamlined, and we don't expect everyone will grow in the same ways or at the same pace. We celebrate and encourage diversity. It's expected that engineers will demonstrate appropriate competencies at different grades.

Competencies and scaling

Competencies scale through scope of influence / impact (from impacting only your own work to impacting your team, multiple teams, the whole engineering organization or the whole company) Competencies also scale through increased frequency or consistency (from "sometimes" to "usually" to "consistently" demonstrating the competency) Some competencies only scale through a limited number of grades, e.g. because they hit a growth limit at certain points. In these cases, the same description may be used across several grades.

Contribution

This repository is provided READ ONLY and no contribution is accepted.

To Mercari members This repository is maintained by the Engineering Office. If you have any requests for changes, please contact the Engineering Office

License

WIP