Building a Career & Feedback Operating System for Engineering at Scale

The Challenge

Without a structured people system, the company risked avoidable attrition, inconsistent performance decisions, and weaker leadership credibility during rapid growth. A fast-growing engineering organization expanded from 25 to 100+ people without a formal career framework, clear progression paths, or a structured feedback cycle. Managers and individual contributors lacked a consistent language for expectations, growth, and performance.

In the first iteration, the leadership team needed a scalable people feedback system that would improve retention, create stronger manager-IC communication, and keep growth sustainable without introducing bureaucratic friction.

My Role

I was part of the engineering department trio specially allocated on this that designed the career framework, feedback model, and rollout plan with engineering leadership and HR partners. I facilitated calibration sessions, wrote the first versions of level expectations, trained managers on feedback conversations, and iterated the system over two years while the broader leadership team improved it and also executed it day to day.

The Solution

Over a two-year implementation, I was the main responsible for the success of the design and rollout of a full people operating model covering mentorship, feedback, and performance management.

1. Mentorship Network Beyond Org Structure

We created a mentor-mentee network independent from the formal org chart, enabling quarterly growth conversations, regular 1:1s, and ad-hoc support channels. This gave engineers safe, consistent communication paths and surfaced issues earlier.

2. Separate Feedback from Evaluation

We decoupled employee feedback from end-of-year performance ratings. The model combined quarterly and ad-hoc feedback talk loops with a separate annual evaluation and a mid-year checkpoint, reducing anxiety and improving clarity of each process.

3. Transparent Career Ladder and Expectations

We implemented clear role definitions, responsibilities, and progression criteria so engineers could understand what success looked like at each level and across 4 different vectors: Job complexity, Technical Skills, Autonomy and Professional Character. Over two years, we iterated the process details to align with cross-department standards and ensure adoption.

The Outcome

• Retention Improvement: Employee turnover hit as low as 7% during high-growth phases.
• Stronger Leadership Signal: Offboarding evaluations reported very high satisfaction with team and leadership quality.
• Faster Issue Discovery: Managers gained earlier visibility into developer-community challenges through recurring feedback channels.
• Sustainable Scale: The organization grew with a clear, transparent, and repeatable performance and career system.