CE Career Development Framework

Our career development framework is here to help you understand the expectations of your role, and to provide a common language for you and your manager to discuss and plan your career growth. It is also an important part of our larger goal of ensuring everyone is equitably recognized for the impact they have at work, and to reduce bias in promotions and hiring.

What are the expectations of my role?

The CE team is a single globally distributed team. There are currently six levels for customers engineers at Sourcegraph. A level is composed of three categories (or core competencies), each with a summary statement and several example behaviors. These core competencies are:

  • Leadership
  • Business
  • Technology

We think of these three core competencies that every CE must demonstrate in order to serve our customers and our business: leadership, business, and technology. Within each pillared competency are defined core behaviors that CEs perform. In most cases, a level builds on the expectations from the preceding levels, eg someone at level 2 must also meet the level 1 expectations. In addition to what is listed in our ladders (stored in Lattice, as well as shown below), we expect every customer engineer, at all levels, to exhibit our values. Also, rather than precede each bullet point with “consistently”, we leave it as implicit. These are the expectations for ICs after they have completed their onboarding.

Leadership

The leadership pillar embodies both the external and internal interpersonal relationships we build and nurture, the way in which we lead customers to value, and how we drive more value and better ways of doing business.

Within the leadership pillar there exists two core responsibility areas:

  • Relationship Management:The application of interpersonal skills required to appropriately manage and nurture relationships; navigating business and / or political considerations.
  • Outcomes: The activities that CEs perform to lead prospective customers to intended and desired outcomes.

Business

The business pillar embodies the way in which we come to know and understand our customers’ business and their needs. It also includes how our business serves these needs.

Within the business pillar there exists two core responsibility areas:

  • Contextual Understanding: The ability to learn various internal and external roles & responsibilities and nurture them uniquely.
  • Operational Excellence: The ability to perform job responsibilities and abide by all team and company processes and procedures.

Technology

The technology pillar embodies the skills necessary to solve customer problems.

Within the technology pillar there exists two core responsibility areas:

  • Sourcegraph Product: The ability to learn about our product capabilities and limitations; apply that knowledge to help customers; extend the boundaries of our capabilities; serve as a voice of the customer back to internal teams.
  • Solving Technical Problems: The expected technical understanding and skillset required in order to deliver value and solutions to prospective customers.

When do I get promoted?

See guidance on promotions here.

CE Regional Team Leads

Team Leads are specially designated senior ICs that are elevated within the team to take on additional responsibilities in support of the overall success of the team and individuals. These individuals are not full-time managers but are intentionally given less IC scope than their peers so that they can contribute to higher level initiatives within the team and organization.

As a Team Lead, their scope and responsibility, in addition to the expectations of their defined IC level, includes:

  • Ownership: responsible for team member adherence to team processes; facilitates and leads inspection of such processes for their team. Participates in intra- and inter-team projects as a leader. Represents the organization in select cross-functional initiatives. Represents technical needs and risks of teams’ book of business in forecast calls.
  • Coordination: coordinates with team members and leadership on ad-hoc requests, process changes, and needs. Coordinates with adjacent teams and leaders on behalf of team needs.
  • Support: directly supports team members day-to-day providing active coaching and mentorship on technical delivery.
  • Adjusts: listens to feedback from team members and adjacent teams getting to root cause of issues and identifies solutions and go-forward plans; guides the team through change.

CEs Transitioning to CE Management

We want to support the career progession of CEs on the Customer Engineering team 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 CE Manager Interview Process for Internal CE Candidates outlines how teammates would go about assessing their readiness for and applying for new CE 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 CE team.

Learn more about CEs transitioning to CE management here.

Levels

Level Relationship Management Outcomes Contextual Understanding Operational Excellence Sourcegraph Product Solving Technical Problems
IC1
A Customer Engineer focused on learning, growth, and establishing themselves as a contributing teammate
Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need.
IC2
A Customer Engineer that can autonomously contribute, execute, and collaborate while developing their skills.
Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need. Not currently defined; will be defined based on future business need.
IC3
An individual contributor that demonstrates required and desired capabilities.
  • Customer Relationships & Influence: Engages with prospective customers in a technical consultancy role during the pre-sales process while providing technical assistance and solution guidance. Builds relationships with key stakeholders to enable them to be Sourcegraph advocates and champions.
  • Soft-skills: Able to establish personal, product, and company-level credibility through communication. Demonstrated ability to mirror the tone of conversations. Ability to create confidence and excitement in Sourcegrah’s capabilities. Negotiates to drive successful client interactions, overcoming common objections; escalates properly and in a timely manner with clear communication throughout.
  • Discovery: Ability to ask open-ended strategic questions that articulates customer pain and can quantify the impact of it.
  • Voice of the Customer: Serve as an advocate to Sourcegraph engineering and marketing teams representing prospective customer needs. Provide insights and input into feature development that may impact team or customer experience.
  • Trial & Technical Win: Able to build a clear and comprehensive trial plan (with complete success criteria), including in situations of non-standard and high-risk requirements. Leads the customer technical evaluations entirely self-directed.
  • Delivery: Ensures timely resolution of issues by managing technical support responses and escalations, communicating priority and urgency appropriately.
  • Value: Applies Sourcegraph Value Framework throughout the sale, tying activities back to outcomes and value.
  • Internal Impact: Creates and shares content based on customer needs.
  • External: Able to properly identify stakeholders and roles, and able to tailor messaging to each appropriately. Can correlate our core uses cases and value drivers per stakeholder persona (IC Eng, IC DevOps, IC Security Analyst, EM, VP, etc).
  • Competitive Landscape: Firm understanding of competitors’ high-level capabilities (including a ‘do nothing’ mentality) and applies knowledge of these capabilities into objection-handling and solution positioning through differentiation.
  • Domain Ecosystem: Possesses comprehensive knowledge of the Sourcegraph platform and associated domain knowledge, educates prospective customers of all sizes on the value proposition of Sourcegraph while participating in discussions throughout the organization to ensure successful Sourcegraph deployment and adoption.
    Process & Deliverables: While adhering to process, provides timely feedback and updates on identified blockers, delays, and risks identified or raised. When creating trial / deployment plans, able to identify interruptions and identify potential paths to keep activities on schedule. Keeps systems up-to-date.
  • Features & Architecture: Understands how core out-of-the-box features are used by other customers in a similar team / vertical / space. Can guide the customer on how to configure parts of the product based on known best practices. Identifies potential issues/limitations of our product or features against the customer’s need / stack, and raises them as product gaps when they impact the customer.
  • Internal: Regularly improves Sourcegraph documentation for clarity and accuracy, adding new explanations, examples, and sections based on experience.
    Able to identify the need for creative solutioning, can fully vet non-typical customer requirements and raises within the team to deliver a workable solution.
IC4
A particularly experienced individual contributor that has mastered capabilities especially in complex circumstances
  • Customer Relationships & Influence: Engages with prospective customers in a technical thought-leadership role. Leverages existing Champions to gain wider access into an account. Uses champions to mitigate detractors, gain access to Economic Buyers (EBs), and find new teams and use-cases to drive expansion.
  • Soft-skills: Able to set the tone of conversations. Able to positively persuade new prospects of Sourcegrah’s value and capabilities. Able to appropriately push back with prospects and negotiate mutually agreed outcomes in contentious situations, reliably and consistently delivers in the midst of political situations with customers to achieve desired outcomes.
  • Discovery: Masters asking open-ended strategic questions; doing so uncovers new use cases, validates existing use cases, and uncovers latent customer pain.
  • Voice of the Customer: Serves as an active collaborator with Sourcegraph engineering and marketing teams to deliver solutions that address customer needs. Speaks directly to the impact / benefit of gaps, features, and needs to internal teams.
  • Trial & Technical Win: Able to design a phased trial plan against complex customer needs. Negotiates and influences scope, plan, and design according to best practices with proven risk mitigation.
  • Delivery: Works with cross-functional teams to align product solutions to meet customer needs in complex scenarios and resolves integration issues as part of initial technical win. Ensures timely resolution of technical issues by coordinating across multiple internal stakeholders to ensure successful resolution of customer needs.
  • Value: Applies Sourcegraph’s Value Framework to influence higher close rates are seen (with unsuccessful ops qualified out earlier).
  • Internal Impact: Anticipates a need or disconnect by which custom content can clarify and progress the relationship, delivering against the need.
  • External: Correlates complex uses cases and value drivers per persona (IC Eng, IC Dev Ops, IC Security Analyst, EM, VP, etc).
  • Internal: Provide mentorship for team members and serves as an active contributor to team-learning initiatives and activities.
  • Competitive Landscape: Advanced up-to-date knowledge of competitors’ high-level capabilities on Sourcegraph’s competitive landscape and their key value propositions, strengths and weaknesses. Able to articulate a before and after scenario that favorably positions Sourcegraph for success.
  • Domain Ecosystem: Drawing from own experience, and knowledge of the developer ecosystem speaks to tools companies use, how they use them, limitations of them, and how Sourcegraph fits in.
  • Process & Deliverables: Proactively anticipates, identifies, and raises blockers, delays, and risks while also establishing proposed solutions or workarounds. Looks for abilities to modify scope / use cases to ensure forward progress against defined process. Creates complex trial and deployment plans and executes against schedule.
  • Internal: Leads clear communications to internal stakeholders, tailored appropriately for the audience. Makes clear asks and communicates clear next steps with committed dates.
  • Features & Architecture: Understands advanced features to deliver customer value through extensibility and customization. Leads the customer on best practices for configuring and using the product, steering clear of less ideal designs in complex customer environments. Can consistently technically advise a path forward when an issue/limitation has been identified.
  • Internal: Maintain a positive personal brand through Sourcegraph-relevant participation channels. Mentor and support junior teammates.
    Able to deliver a custom solution to meet a stated customer need.
IC5
An individual who excels in their capabilities and emphasizes leadership and growth.
  • Customer Relationships & Influence: Builds and maintains relationships with customer executives (VP level+) as an industry SME, and uses those relationships to progress our position and relationship. Situational awareness and capability to involve the right resources based on cultural/personality aspects that match client expectations / fit context. Can reference examples of where we have uncovered new opportunities to make Sourcegraph stickier and more widely used.
  • Soft-skills: Capable of selecting the appropriate engagement style (light touch, consultative, deep technical handholding, ..) and changing it based on context.
  • Discovery: Uses broad and deep technical knowledge, along with proven ability to ask strategic questions, to uncover new use cases, validate existing use cases, and uncover latent customer pain, and can tie impact of Sourcegraph to customer’s business outcomes.
  • Voice of the Customer: Collaborates with engineering, marketing, sales, and management on strategies that result in an improved win rate. Demonstrated ability to manage project and product changes by re-aligning internal and external teams to customer needs and business value.
  • Trial & Technical Win: Turns gaps into opportunities by formulating a plan for success and technical design while leading activity against the trial plan on behalf of customers. Leads complex, large-scale technical wins.
  • Delivery: Provide assistance to Sourcegraph teammates as a pre-sales and technical solutions subject matter expert across top ARR customers and top iARR expansion opportunities.
  • Value: Applies Sourcegraph’s Value Framework to such an extent that subsequent expansions are achieved within the account.
  • Internal Impact: Identifies patterns of needs and subsequently delivers high-value, reusable content (both enablement and customer-facing) that measurably improves the team’s effectiveness and execution.
  • External: Able to go into an account and find new advocates; able to identify potential champions for AE to lead the effort to establish a relationship. Enables and excites advocates (both customer and external/industry) on Sourcegraph technologies and solutions.
  • Internal: Actively mentors junior ICs on how to best engage various functions and roles and can point to positive outcomes in other opportunities as a result of direct mentorship.
  • Competitive Landscape: Through expertise and experience, brings insights back to internal teams to help Sourcegraph further differentiate our capabilities both rooted in customer scenarios and broader industry trends.
  • Domain Ecosystem: Use technical and market knowledge to create new solutions with customers that can influence expansion opportunities of products to broader Sourcegraph customer base. Able to articulate industry trends including use cases and challenges, and how they relate to Sourcegraph. Build and maintain select subject matter expertise related to Sourcegraph targeted industries through monitoring and / or participation in external working groups or committees.
  • Process & Deliverables: Documents setups and customizations to enable other teams. Creates reference architectures for complex architectures and effectively communicate the design and it’s value to customers and Sourcegraph team members. Is the shining example for all others to emulate, particularly in complex and high-stakes situations.
  • Internal: Acts as role model for more junior/new team members for managing time. Influences process improvements and directly iterates on existing deliverables. Champions change directly and leads team enablement.
  • Features & Architecture: Understands advanced features to deliver customer value through extensibility and customization. Anticipates issues and limitations and either descopes or delivers a custom solution to address the need. Ability to guide a technical audience towards good engineering disciplines and demonstrated experience in what it takes to incorporate Sourcegraph into a customer architecture.
  • Internal: Shares subject matter expertise through Slack posts, documentation updates, internal technical collaboration, and other common collaboration mechanisms.
    Proactively identifies opportunities or gaps where a custom solution can solve a need, able to deliver a working solution to address need.
IC6
A subject matter expert with a visible external brand / presence in the developer ecosystem; a Senior Principal CE / Field CTO.
We haven’t defined this level at Sourcegraph yet, which would be equivalent in impact to a Director. Like IC5, this is a different role than the levels preceding it based not only on performance, but also company need, and (like IC5) what impact at this level looks like may vary more from person to person than at preceding levels. We haven’t defined this level at Sourcegraph yet, which would be equivalent in impact to a Director. Like IC5, this is a different role than the levels preceding it based not only on performance, but also company need, and (like IC5) what impact at this level looks like may vary more from person to person than at preceding levels. We haven’t defined this level at Sourcegraph yet, which would be equivalent in impact to a Director. Like IC5, this is a different role than the levels preceding it based not only on performance, but also company need, and (like IC5) what impact at this level looks like may vary more from person to person than at preceding levels. We haven’t defined this level at Sourcegraph yet, which would be equivalent in impact to a Director. Like IC5, this is a different role than the levels preceding it based not only on performance, but also company need, and (like IC5) what impact at this level looks like may vary more from person to person than at preceding levels. We haven’t defined this level at Sourcegraph yet, which would be equivalent in impact to a Director. Like IC5, this is a different role than the levels preceding it based not only on performance, but also company need, and (like IC5) what impact at this level looks like may vary more from person to person than at preceding levels. We haven’t defined this level at Sourcegraph yet, which would be equivalent in impact to a Director. Like IC5, this is a different role than the levels preceding it based not only on performance, but also company need, and (like IC5) what impact at this level looks like may vary more from person to person than at preceding levels.