Our career level framework is meant to help you understand the expectations of your role and provide a common vocabulary for you and your manager to discuss and plan your career development on the CS team (in addition to where you might want to take your career in the future as outlined in our career roadmap practice). Having shared and visible expectations (as well as a common vocabulary) gives us an accountability framework to reduce bias in promotions/hiring and ensures that we are equitably recognizing everyone for their impact.

What are the expectations of my role?

There are currently five levels for support at Sourcegraph. A level is composed of four categories, each with a summary statement and several example behaviors. These categories are:

• Impact

  • Your work directly contributes to achieving the company’s strategic goals and long term success.

• Scope

  • You have high productivity and output. You deliver on your direct responsibilities while also looking for opportunities for improvement - individually, as a team, our product, and company.

• Execution

  • You seek out opportunities, rather than waiting for them to come to you.
  • You put our customers and prospects first, orienting yourself to their success.
  • You ask for help directly, when needed.

• Teamwork

  • You do not gate-keep, but rather aim to accelerate and unblock your colleagues.
  • You communicate thoughtfully, clearly, and proactively to keep stakeholders informed and identify risks.
  • You seek to help your teammates around you succeed; you win together. You reflect thoughtfully on your own performance and the performance of those around you, sharing helpful feedback for continued growth.

It’s important to understand that what is listed in the level descriptions are example behaviors, and not checkboxes for promotion. Doing everything listed there is neither necessary nor sufficient for a promotion. The expectation is that you demonstrate a level of impact consistently over a span of months within each of the category descriptions for your level. The magnitude of your impact is ultimately the measure of your career growth.

In most cases, a level builds on the expectations from the preceding levels: someone at level 2 must also meet the level 1 expectations. In addition to what is listed there, we expect technical advisors at all levels to exhibit our Sourcegraph company values.

Rather than precede each bullet point with “consistently,” we leave it as implicit and we define this as X happening consistently over a period of at least ~6 months. It’s great to do something once, but the real measure of impact is if you are able to do that again and again over a substantial enough period of time.

The level descriptions state the minimum expectations after you have completed your onboarding. For example, if you were hired at a level 2, we would expect that you are having the impact outlined for both levels 1 and 2 once your onboarding is complete. This also means that before being promoted to level 3, for example, you would be expected to be already doing what is listed in level 3 before a promotion is possible.

We expect you to understand where you are at in the framework and always have something clearly defined that is pushing you to outgrow yourself to reach the next level. The process and timeline will vary person to person and should be captured in your career roadmap.

Transitioning to TA Management

We want to support the career progression of individuals based on their individual career goals and aspirations. For those that desire to move from an individual contributor (IC) role to a management role, the TA Manager Interview Process for Internal TA Candidates outlines how teammates would go about assessing their readiness for and applying for new TA Manager roles that open up. The goal of this process is provide clear visibility into what expectations should be for career advancement into management within the TA team.

Learn more about transitioning to TA management ‣.

Levels

IC1

• Impact:
  • Achieves an annual average of 105%+/= 5% NDR and 85%+/- 5% GRR.
  • Overall portfolio averages customer health score of 7.0.
• Scope:
  • Manages primarily SMB and MM (sub-$100k ARR) customers.
  • Creates, experiments with, continuously improves, and maintains campaigns and customer-facing collateral simultaneously, ensuring high-quality content and timely delivery.
  • Analyzes customer usage data to create targeted enablement materials, enhancing the customer experience. Able to identify trends via data and construct appropriate tailored outreach.
  • Learns about general software development lifecycle practices and demonstrates a foundational understanding of our product and capabilities.
• Execution:
  • Onboarding of new customers via many-to-many campaigns that allow the customer to self-serve, leading to initial engagement and long-term satisfaction.
  • Proactively monitoring customer health and running plays and experiments to improve it, where needed
  • Exhibiting a high degree of initiative in understanding customer needs based on data and feedback and starts to identify and implement solutions.