Talent Sourcer, Carwow

Every engineer has a career growth plan and goals agreed with their manager, with regular check-ins and feedback cycles to help us get there. Our progression framework has clear levelling, exemplar behaviours and skills, and distinct pathways for those who would rather remain an IC, pursue technical leadership, or manage engineers. I've been through 2 promotion cycles at Carwow, and both felt like they came at a good point in my career where I'd grown enough to step into a new role, but challenging enough to provide some new opportunities.

I've found product teams at Carwow are full of hardworking but kind colleagues. We hold ourselves and each other to a high standard, through honest feedback and retrospective sessions, but are incredibly supportive when needed. As new engineers join our teams, for example, it's never hard to find someone happy to pair on a problem, explain some of the context, or lend a hand.

We quite proudly take 'boring' technical decisions at Carwow, leaning on frameworks like Rails and always simplifying our stack where possible, with an explicit goal of making it as easy as possible for new engineers to join and quickly become productive. We deliver work progressively in small chunks, and have a mature set of tools around feature flagging, observability, fast CI, and site reliability to help us do that as quickly as possible.

A significant proportion of carwow's mid-managerial leaders have been internally promoted, and there are countless examples of people going from an individual contributor to leading teams of 5+ within 18mths (including myself!) Furthermore, I felt very supported when taking these steps up - with an appreciation of how raw I was in many of the core capabilities needed to lead a team and influence. I was worried about it being a step too far, and that hasn't been the case due to great managerial support.

Carwow just raised further funding to rapidly scale the service helping customers to sell their vehicles, a hot market right now. This is a huge focus internally and leads to some very new questions - that are always fun to tackle! There's a massive opportunity to diversify outside of our traditional car-purchasing product.

I've had 3 separate managers in my 18mths here at carwow, each of them helping me develop in different areas. Our 'People' team does a great job at setting the base expectations of managers, and new managers go through extensive training with 3rd parties, but there is significant free reign to manage how you would like - which I feel leads to managers playing to their strengths.