Engineering Grading System at Devexperts

In Devexperts, we created the Grading System which:

Synchronizes engineering grades across the company,
Makes career levels transparent,
Specifies our expectations from engineering managers and individual contributors (engineers).

There are 7 grade levels for Engineers (E1 - E7) and 3 grade levels for Engineering Managers(EM1 - EM3). These tracks are not dead ends. There are various career development options that are too custom to be put into the system.

For Engineering Grades, there are the following main sections:

For Engineering Managers' Grades, there are the following main sections:

Overview and regular tasks (the most important part) - "What is my level of responsibility?",
People management - "How do I work with people inside and outside my team?",
Project / Product development - "What is my impact?"
Knowledge sharing - "How did I organize the knowledge exchange inside and outside the team?"
English language level

Notes:

Some links may not work for external users because they lead to company's internal documents.
If you are not familiar with some abbreviations or terms, check them in Glossary

Basic Principles

Prove your skills first to get an upgrade.
Your hard skills set does not guarantee your level upgrade. Your impact on the project plays a much bigger role.
Different levels require different balances between skills.
No level downgrades.
It's an Employee's responsibility to showcase their achievements.
The best upgrade is the one that's evident to everyone.
Levels are cumulative. Each subsequent level incorporates the previous ones.
Ideally, the grading documentation should be reviewed more than once a year through recurrent one-on-ones.