Waypoints — A SWE Career Development Framework

Software engineering is constantly evolving. However, even as AI is transforming how code gets written, the fundamental traits that make great engineers – problem-solving, system thinking, and product sensibility – are just as important as ever.

Waypoints is an open source career development framework that emphasizes the scope and impact of engineering work, encouraging teams to think more holistically about how their technical decisions drive business value. It provides clear guidance for both individual contributors and engineering managers, with level descriptions that reflect the changing nature of software development while reinforcing timeless engineering principles.

Use the framework as-is, or fork it and customize it for your team's needs.

Overview

This framework addresses common challenges in engineering career development by providing:

• Clear level definitions and rubrics from L1 (entry level) through L6 (principal)
• Parallel tracks for individual contributors and managers
• Detailed expectations across multiple dimensions for each level
• Practical management guidance for supporting engineer growth
• Implementation guidelines

In a future version we plan to introduce the concept of "Specialist Tracks" which allow for diverse and individualized career paths.

The content is hosted at waypnts.com.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to the Waypoints framework and site! Please see our CONTRIBUTING.md for our code of conduct and guidelines on how to structure your commits and understand our versioning system. Your help ensures that the documentation remains clear, consistent, and valuable to the community.

Licensing

This project is licensed under two different licenses to cover both the documentation and any code contributions:

• Content, Documentation and Non-Code Assets: Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This allows you to share and adapt the content as long as you give proper credit. See the LICENSE file for details.

• Code Contributions: Licensed under the MIT License. Any scripts, tools, or code provided in this repository are free to use, modify, and distribute under this permissive license. See the LICENSE file for details.

By contributing to this project, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under these same licenses.