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Awesome Tech Roles

Awesome

Tech-adjacent Job titles, roles, career paths by role and responsibility in Software and Information Technology ("IT", "ICT", "Tech") organizations, or organization that sees themselves as technology-driven and embraces a product mindset.

This list does not cover non-tech industry enterprises, consulting firms, managed service providers, service delivery firms or startups, as many roles in those (e.g. Architect, Program Manager) have different, often hierarchical or organizational, meaning (e.g. Analyst, Manager, Operations). This list ist not a definition but an observation.

Contents

Role Overviews

Not focused on management overall although some links might lead to it. Instead, see for instance Awesome Engineering Team Management.

Tech Ladders and other hierarchical progress

Tech Roles in a team and lateral progress

Career Management

Interviews

Role Descriptions

Similar to: Jobs, Designations, Careers paths, Ladders

Trying to cluster similar tech-adjacent roles in terms of roles and responsibilities, without forcing or defining a right or wrong model. Similarity is based on common tech industry use, not purity, think "also known as". As far as possible leaving out levels (e.g. "Senior", "Associate", "Apprentice"), scope (e.g. "Specialist", "Professional", "Strategy"), competency (e.g. "Staff", "Research"), technology (e.g. "Full-stack", "Cloud", "Analytics"), influence (e.g. "Principal", "Architect", "Fellow"), interaction (e.g. "Customer", "Player-Coach"), vanity (e.g. "Executive", "Lead", "Head of") or management responsibility (e.g. "Tech Lead Manager (TLM)", "Director"). Leaving out general corporate functions such as HR, Operations / BizOps, Finance, Marketing / Go-To-Market, Legal and Research / Science.

Product

Designer

Similar to: User Experience (UX) Designer / Engineer / Researcher, Frontend, Interaction Designer / Engineer, Product Designer, Usability, Accessibility, Information Architecture

See also: Product Manager, Technical Writer

Developer Advocate

Similar to: Evangelist, Developer Relations (DevRel), Developer Experience (DX), Open Source Relations, Product Strategist, Customer Insight, Customer Empathy, Community Ops

See also: Solution Architect, Learning and Enablement, Technical Writer

Product Manager (PM)

Similar to: Product Owner, Business Analyst, Requirements Engineer, System Analyst

See also: Program Manager, Developer Advocate, Designer, Product Operations

Product Operations (POps)

Similar to: Product Ops, Product Support, Customer Experience

See also: Program Manager, Support Engineer, Developer Advocate, Customer Success Manager

  • Making the Case for Product Operations - Podcast with Denise Tilles in the Product Thinking Blog.
  • Product Operations Manager Role - Product School explanation of how Product Ops fits into Product Management e.g. managing the product feedback loop.
  • Product Operations Pillars - Blake Bassett's classic reference framework for roles and responsibilities of a Product Operations Team.
  • Rise of Product Ops - Product Operations is mentioned below under support, but another option is to see managing user feedback and launches from a product roadmap perspective.
  • The Product Culture Shift - Camille Fournier on Product Culture, which does not mention Product Ops but Customer Empathy which is often the focus of Product Operations organizations.
  • Voice of Customer Programs - Advertorial but good overview on Voice of the Customer or Customer Insights Programs which sometimes is in Product Operations organizations, other times in Go-to-Market or Customer Success Organizations.

Project Manager

Similar to: Program Manager, Project Portfolio Manager, Technical Program Manager (TPM, TPgM), Consultant, Delivery Manager

See also: Product Manager (PM), Product Operations

Technical Writer

Similar to: (Copy) Editor, Tech Writer, UX Writer, Documentation Manager / Designer, Content Strategist, Product Marketing Manager (PMM)

See also: Learning and Enablement, Developer Advocate

Software Engineer (SWE)

Similar to: Engineer, Software Developer, Software Development Engineer (SDE), Programmer, Coder, Tech Lead, Product Engineer, Applied Engineering

See also: Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Quality Assurance (QA)

Similar to: Tester, Test Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, Software Developer in Test (SDET)

See also: Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Operations

Data Analyst

Similar to: Data Scientist, Business Intelligence Analyst, Quantitative Researcher, Operations Analyst, Machine Learning Researcher

See also: Data Engineer, Support Engineer, Trust and Safety Analysts

Data Engineer

Similar to: Machine Learning Engineer, AI Engineer, Analytics Engineer, Business Intelligence (Intel) Engineer

See also: Data Analyst, Software Engineer (SWE), Integration Engineer, Quality Assurance (QA) when it comes to data quality and AI finetuning

Security Engineer

Similar to: Security Analyst, Cybersecurity Analyst, Vulnerability Researcher, Information Security ("InfoSec") Engineer, Threat Intelligence, Hacker, Red Team

See also: Trust and Safety Analyst

Trust and Safety Analyst

Similar to: Fraud Investigator, Policy and Governance, Compliance, Risk Analyst, Incident Response, Content Review, Policy Enforcement

See also: Security Analyst, Data Analyst

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Similar to: Reliability Engineer, DevOps / DevSecOps Engineer, System Administrator, Platform Engineer / Team, Infrastructure Engineer, Production Engineer, No Code Operations, Resilience Engineer

See also: Support Engineer, IT Operations, Quality Assurance

  • 7 Lessons From 10 Outages - How life really is on-call explained in The Downtime Project's podcast.
  • A feedback loop between Dev and Ops - Using documentation (runbooks) to bridge dev and ops teams (see below Technical Writer).
  • Are we there yet? - Thoughts on assessing an SRE team's maturity in the Google Blog.
  • Building Platform Teams - ThoughtWorks blog on how to build platform teams and what metrics they are measured on.
  • Can Resilience Engineering be described in 5 minutes? - Adaptive Capacity Labs conducts deeper post mortem analysis and retrospectives on learning from failures, pitching a role "resilience engineering".
  • DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering - Tweet unroll of the difference between Software Development, DevOps, SRE and towards Platform Engineering.
  • DORA - The DORA State of DevOps research program which formed the basis for the Accelerate book (see above), especially the practice "Empowering Teams".
  • Facebook Configuration Management - (historic context) Classic blog post that open-sourced Chef, written by Production Engineers which would now be called Platform Team.
  • Getting into DevOps - ThoughtWorks overview on the history and different styles of DevOps teams including DevNetOps and DevSecOps.
  • Google SRE Interview - Niall Murphy and Ben Treynor from Google in an early interview on the SRE practice and comparison to the industry.
  • Howie Guide - Jeli.io's Howie Post-Incident Guide described learning from failures and near-misses. It focuses on tech roles but in the Interview section explains connections to tech-adjacent roles, too.
  • Incident Operations - The SRE book defines roles during an incident like ops lead, incident commander and communication lead.
  • Jez Humble's DevOps insights - For historic context one of the earlier talks by Jez Humble in the New Relic blog.
  • Making Ops work more visible - Interesting story from Netflix' DevOps journey from "You run it" to SRE and Platforms teams.
  • No Code Operations - Good example of maintenance and operations not only covering Code but all kinds of business processes modelled in all kinds of tools, including No-Code, from Excel to Airtable (for which this is an advertorial).
  • Performance Management Maturity Levels - This is actually a list of software performance not career performance points but it contains an interesting section recognizin the need of management buy-in for platform work.
  • Platform as a Product - Using Team Topologies (see above) to redefine platforms as valuable products (this could also belong to IT Operations, ongoing discussion on Forrester here).
  • Production Engineers at Facebook - Meta's implementation of DevOps and their version of SRE is the "Production Engineer"; the role is explained in the "Seeking SRE" book.
  • School of SRE - LinkedIn's SRE onboarding and training material.
  • SRE at LinkedIn - Good historic background on how the LinkedIn SRE team evolved very early.
  • SRE implements DevOps - OG Seth Vargo and Liz Fong-Jones' legendary blog post and YouTube video series explaining SRE.
  • SRE in the real world - Niall Murphy, author of many SRE books, explaining Google SREs the difference to SRE in other orgs and interestingly finding the closest similarity with Staff Engineers.
  • Systems design explains the world - Classic Apenwarr post that talks about innovator's dilemma, second-system effect and being glue - basically what in traditional enterprises is referred to as "architect" role but in tech is often SRE and Product Managers.
  • The SRE Book - The seminal SRE books by Betsy Beyer et al. freely available - here the link to the introduction "The Sysadmin Approach to Service Management".
  • Trunk and Branches Model - Will Larson's learnings scaling infrastructure organizations using his Trunk and Branches Model.
  • What does an SRE do - Excellent short overview on the SRE role especially across seniority levels.

IT Operations

Similar to: System Administrator (Sys Admin), Infrastructure Services, IT System Engineer, IT Support Specialist, Technical Staff, Technical Operations (TechOps), ITOps, *Ops, Incident Response, Database Administrator (DBA), Data Center Technician

See also: Support Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Customer-facing, pre-commit

Account Manager (AM)

Similar to: Account Executive (AE), Field Sales Representative (FSR), Account Representative ("Rep"), Commercial Manager, Sales, Business Development (BD), Relationship Manager, Key Account Manager (KAM), Strategic Account Manager (SAM)

See also: Sales Engineer, Technical Account Manager (TAM), Customer Success Manager (CSM)

Sales Engineer (SE)

Similar to: Customer Engineer, Principal Architect, Account Strategist, Technical Consultant, Technical Sales, Demo / Spike / PoC Engineer, Solutions Engineer

See also: Technical Account Manager (TAM), Account Manager, Solution Architect, Customer Success Manager (CSM)

Solution Architect (SA)

Similar to: Solutions Architect, Solution Sales, Solution Planner, Technology Architect, Technical Architect, Enterprise Architect, Office of the CTO (OCTO), Evangelist, Customer Advocacy

See also: Sales Engineer (SE), Technical Account Manager (TAM)

  • Accenture Career Blog - (For comparison) Explaining the Technology Architect role for Consulting / Service Provider / Service Delivery firms which usually focuses on projects, not products.
  • Architects, Anti-Patterns, and Organizational Fuckery - Charity Majors' excellent summary of a mega thread of Twitter shows why this list as well does not include a separate Architect role, because it should be a function within a role or rotation. She does however explicitly exclude SA, as advisory is generally something good.
  • Awesome Software Architecture - Awesome list of general software architecture resources which (sadly) is mostly not connected to the term "architect".
  • Databricks Economic Benefits - Advertorial but a good example how many product / platform companies move up the value chain to management consulting e.g. Databricks with their Resident Solution Architect which is more similar to a TAM or CSM.
  • The daily life of field CTO - Senior SAs are sometimes called Office of the CTO or Field CTO - blog by Kai Waehner on that role.
  • The different types of Software Architects - (For comparison) while this addresses primarily traditional enterprise concerns who use the C4 model, it is a handy guide to distinguish the Solution Architect in Tech from these.
  • GitHub OCTO - GitHub's research unit is responsible to syndicate their view of the future of technology.
  • How Google's Office of the CTO is Redefining Collaboration - Podcast with Google Cloud's OCTO with the history and future of the team.
  • How we close deals and keep customers happy with Slack Connect - Slack's Technical Architects are part of the Sales Customer Success (CSM) organization but guide the implementation, like Deployment Engineers.
  • Problems with Solution Selling - Account managers are usually value or challenger selling because solution and product selling is more complex which makes commercials harder.
  • SAP Solution Blog - (For comparision) Explaining Solution Architects for ISV / SaaS solution providers, focused on long-term system design while customers and consultants customize their product.
  • The role of customer advocacy in sales and support - Industry-group overview of customer advocacy as a role between marketing and sales, often performed by industry (as oposted to solution/technical focus) SAs.
  • Solution Architect — Who Am I? - Solution Archicture is a term used very differently in industry (Enterprise Architecture), Services Delivery / Professional Services / System Integration (Project Scoping / Planning) and SaaS / Consumption business / pay-as-you-go - this explains the latter and explains the career path.
  • Solution Architect in SAFe - Written from an enterprise point of view (SAFe) but creating, defining and communicating a shared technical and architectural vision also applies to the pre-commit stage of a customer "solution" aka "project".
  • The Solution Architect's Guide to Serverless - Example of considerations that Solution Architects might consider, serverless is a good example because it leans towards business "solutions".
  • Why is it great to be a Consultant - (For comparison) often solution architecture is performed as review by external consultants - here are some advantages of this approach. See also "So you want to be an IT Consultant?" for historic comparison.

Customer-facing, post-commit

Customer Success Manager (CSM)

Similar to: Account Manager, Enterprise Services Manager (ESM), Account Strategist, Customer Experience, Customer Advocacy

See also: Account Manager, Technical Account Manager (TAM), Support Engineer

Integration Engineer / Consultant

Similar to: Deployment Engineer / Strategist, Migration Engineer, Field Engineer, Professional Services, Delivery Architect, Technology Architect, (Customer) Solution(s) Engineer, Implementation Services, Implementation Consultant, System Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE), Client Services Engineer

See also: Solution Architect, Partner Engineer

Partner Engineer

Similar to: Partnership Manager, Alliance Manager, Partner Development Manager (PDM), Partner Solution Architect, Partner Solution Engineer, Partner Support, System Engineer, Deployment Engineer, Field Engineer

See also: Learning and Enablement, Developer Advocate (DevRel), Integration Engineer

Managed Services

Similar to: Business-critical services, Customer IT Operations, Service Delivery, Client Technical Solutions, Professional, Specialist, Outsourcing

  • Accenture Infrastructure Services - Accenture (consulting firm, not strictly Tech) explaining capabilities it offers to customers to manage their cloud e.g. FinOps.
  • Azure Expert MSP - Microsoft Azure has one of the most mature managed services partners programs.
  • Cisco Partner Managed Services - Cisco pivoted from hardware into services but smarter than IBM with a managed services strategy that included partners.
  • Huawei's Own Digital Transformation - (For comparison) Network Managed Services are especially prevalent in outsourcing-heavy Telecommunications (Telco) firms, a view inside Huawei's Service-Delivery Platform shows how everything centers around tracking managed services and resource allocation.
  • IBM spins of Kyndryl - Over the years, IBM had become a managed services business and now spun it off.
  • Palo Alto - Many companies move to SaaS by offering their product in the Cloud including managed services, for instance Palo Alto offers managed security services.

Technical Account Manager (TAM)

Similar to: Enterprise Services Manager (ESM), Account Strategist, Customer Experience, Service Account Manager / Support Account Manager (SAM), Customer Success Engineer

See also: Account Manager (AM), Solution Architect (SA), Customer Success Manager (CSM)

Learning and Enablement

Similar to: Practice Lead, Instructor, Coach, Moderator, Facilitator, Trainer, Instructional Designer, Customer Education, Technical Enablement, Field Enablement

See also: Partner Engineer, Technical Writer, Developer Advocate (DevRel)

  • Communities of Practice - Emily Webber's classic article introducing the roles in internal communities of practices and how trainers own organizational development.
  • Customer Education - Advertorial but a good list of priorities in a customer education / learning and enablement team.
  • Design Sprint - The Design Sprint Methodology is a mix of Design Thinking and Lean and collaborates across roles often facilitated by a coach.
  • Distributed Education - Advertorial but good background on challenges for educators post-pandemic.
  • Field Enablement at GitLab - GitLabs field enablement role is interesting because it's very broad, containing parts of marketing, strategic ops (StratOps) and culture.
  • Glitch Interview - Interview with a Developer Advocate how they used Glitch to facilitate easy web coding classes.
  • Pitfalls to Avoid When Building a CCoE - AWS blog post on how to build up a cloud center of excellence (or any center of excellence).
  • Remote Education - GitHub Blog Series on best practices for online campus communities.
  • The Who What How and Why of Sales Enablement - Classic Gartner article that defines the pillars of the Sales Enablement function.
  • Stop sidelining your network team - Advertorial by A Cloud Guru (now part of PluralSight) showing the need for re-skilling due to technology changes, here with the example of network infrastructure to Cloud.
  • The Programmer's Brain - The Programmer's Brain is a bug summarizing tons of Felienne Hermans's research on learning, understanding and collaboration for engineers.
  • Trainer at SAP - Explaining the trainer role at SAP, long time known to have a huge industry-specific education organization.

Support Engineer

Similar to: Support Operations, Technical Solution Engineer (TSE), Technical Support Engineer (TSE), Product Technology Manager, Technical Product Expert (TPE), Incident Response, Support Escalation Engineer, L2 / L3 Engineer

See also: Data Analyst, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Technical Account Manager (TAM), Customer Success Manager (CSM), Product Operations

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