Circle CI: Engineering Competency Matrix

Technical leaders need more than theory-they need concrete examples of how successful companies define growth. This page gathers dozens of actual career frameworks, from product design at Figma to engineering ladders at GitLab, giving leaders a menu of proven structures to compare against their own orgs. The collection surfaces not just titles but the underlying expectations, pay bands, and the rationale behind each level.

Figma's design ladder shows a flat hierarchy where everyone is a "Designer" but responsibilities and pay scale increase with seniority, highlighting a simple yet effective approach. Wise (formerly Transferwise) offers an interactive map that links product roles to salary bands across geographies and credits the framework with boosting gender balance in their PM team. 8th Light's grid separates technical ability from organizational impact, making room for both ICs and aspiring leaders. GitLab's massive framework spans engineering, design, and more, illustrating how a remote-first company documents expectations at scale.

Meetup's recent release adds a maker vs manager path, with levels from 2 to 8 and clear definitions for a product engineering lead role that isn't tied to seniority. The collection also includes frameworks from Enviro, Farewill, FirstPort, and others, each providing concrete role descriptions, competency matrices, and sometimes salary data. Together they form a practical toolkit for building transparent, fair progression systems.

For a technical leader, these frameworks solve three core problems: they clarify career-development pathways, they provide a scalable way to align expectations across growing teams, and they create shared documentation that eases performance reviews, hiring, and compensation planning. By adopting or adapting these models, leaders can reduce ambiguity, improve retention, and ensure that growth opportunities are visible and equitable.

The value lies in the ability to copy, customize, and communicate a clear progression map without starting from scratch. Whether you're formalizing a new IC track or introducing a parallel manager path, the examples here show the language, metrics, and structure that make a framework actionable and trusted across the organization.