Engineering ladder
An engineering ladder is a documented framework defining the levels, expectations, and progression criteria for engineering roles at an organisation. Typical ladders span 6-10 levels from junior engineer to staff, principal, or distinguished engineer, with explicit role expectations at each level for technical skill, scope of impact, leadership, and judgement.
Public examples (Rent the Runway, CircleCI, Patreon, Carta) are useful templates but rarely transplant directly — the ladder reflects an organisation's culture and stage. Common pitfalls: collapsing the IC and management tracks into one (forces engineers into management to advance); over-engineering the rubric (so granular nobody reads it); not refreshing it as the organisation grows. The ladder is most useful as a calibration tool for promotion decisions and a planning tool for individual development conversations. Stride's research finds that explicit ladders correlate with lower attrition at the senior-IC level — engineers who can't see a forward path leave faster than engineers who can.