The 4 Kinds of Software Engineers you’ll find at a Startup
All the job titles that new CS grads apply to say “Software Engineer”. This is silly. Football players don’t apply to be a “Football Player” - receivers use dramatically different skills compared to linemen or quarterbacks. So too for for software engineers: in the real world, different teams and roles requires different approaches and skillsets.
Below, I have done my best to document the kinds of engineering roles and personalities I encountered during my time at companies like Facebook, Opendoor and MasterClass. Hopefully, it’ll help Engineers decide what kind of job they should look for next, and help Founders decide who they need to hire and when.
| Category | Founding Engineer | Growth Engineer | Product Engineer | Platform Engineer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I do ___ so we can ___ |
Build V1 of the product get to PMF |
Optimize key metrics make that $$$ |
Build the product make customers happy |
Optimize eng velocity get more done |
| Archetypal Example | Greg Brockman Early Eng → CTO @ Stripe, → Co-founded OpenAI |
Darius Contractor Growth Eng at Dropbox → Head of Growth at Messenger/Airtable |
Lenny Rachinsky Longtime Engineer/EM → PM Leader at Airbnb → Substackerista |
Brendan Burns Invented K8s at Google → Distinguished Eng career at Microsoft |
| Company Stage | Day 1 until Series A, though try to keep them around through to IPO | Once you have ~$5M in revenue, usually Series ~B onwards |
Once you have PMs or can’t sell the “founding team” dream anymore. Series Seed/A onwards |
Once you have 30 or so engineers, Usually series B onwards. |
| Focused on Metrics? | 🔴“I’m moving this 0 to a 1, does that count?” | ✅✅ “that’s the whole job” | 🤔 “theoretically, but my true love is |
✅ gives presentations like “how we moved p95 response time down 120ms” |
| Puts CS degree to good use? | 🟡 maybe if it’s a very technical product | 🔴 only if “learning to do the minimum to pass” counts | 🟡 maybe if you’re building at actual scale | ✅ actually? maybe. |
| Scrappy? | ✅ not really a choice | ✅ but never full cowboy | 🙅♂️ we do things properly | 🙅♂️ only during SEVs |
| Sworn Enemy | Ex-big company Product Engineers. | Experiment Cleanup | Growth Engineers | Product Engineer trying to use terraform |
| Typical Background | Product Engineer looking to do “earlier stage” | New Grad confused how they ended up on Growth | Ex-FAANG looking to do “earlier stage” but tricked into doing this instead | Product Engineer tired of not getting tech debt prioritized by their PMs |
| Ideal Backgrounds | New Grad full of optimism or Former Founder that isn’t dead inside | Former Founder that is dead inside | New Grad excited about posting those “day in the life” tiktoks. | Platform Engineer from similar but slightly larger company with an “eng blog” |
| Challenging transition from | Platform Eng: “I spent the last week getting everything running in Docker and K8s, we’re ready for scaling now.” | Product Engineer: “The spec is super basic, and I don’t think the designer thought through the edge cases.” | Founding Eng: “Oh, the project I hacked together this week had been a quarterly OKR a different team? They’re welcome.” | Coding Bootcamp |
| Ambition | Founding my own startup. Failing that, I’ll run Engineering here. | Founding my own company. Failing that, I’ll become a PM here. | Switch companies every two years until one of them IPOs, then r/fatfire | Just add “staff” to my title and pay me more, it’s fine. |
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Thanks to Trevor & Josiah for contributing ideas.
Tags: #advice-for-engineers #career-development #humor #growth-engineering