Why we shared our engineering career map and salary bands (and the startup reality behind it)

If you look at the tech industry in Europe today, career progression and compensation are still often treated like a black box. You apply for a job, guess a number and hope the negotiation lands in your favor.

We decided to take a different approach for our Software Engineering hiring. It is our largest team, so it has the scale where sharing salary ranges makes the most sense. More importantly, we are proud of the strong compensation we offer and we want to be upfront about it. That’s why we published our Career Map, showing our software engineering progression tracks and the salary bands attached to them.

But there’s an important caveat: a career map on a webpage looks neat, but startup life is messy. Here is how we actually use it to navigate growth at Shapr3D.

1. It’s a only a compass

When companies grow, they often rush to create highly specific, 18-point checklists for every job title. People start focusing more on "checking the boxes" than actually shipping great products.

We are still a fast-moving startup. Roles are fluid, priorities shift and the problems we solve change fast. Our career map is a compass, not a formula. It sets the guardrails for our salary bands so that compensation remains fair and transparent. But it doesn't try to script your day-to-day job.

2. "Senior" doesn't look the same on everyone

In a rigid corporate structure, everyone at a certain level is expected to behave the same way. At Shapr3D, we value diverse strengths.

A "senior" engineer on our team doesn't fit a single template:

• One senior might be an exceptionally deep technical specialist who solves our most complex CAD modeling problems with a handful of team members.
• Another senior might be a high-agency execution engine who thrives on driving cross-team alignment and shipping features fast.

Both are incredibly valuable. Both fit into our senior salary bands. We assess your overall impact across knowledge, delivery, and collaboration, but we don't expect you to be a carbon copy of the person sitting next to you.

3. We calibrate impact

We don't promote people just because they've spent x number of months in a seat. We promote based on the outcomes they own.

Every six months, we sit down to calibrate where everyone is. We look at the value you are actively delivering and adjust compensation objectively based on those outcomes. If you are operating at a higher level, your pay will reflect that. If you’re still growing into a role, we’ll give you honest, constructive feedback and support to help you get there. There's no corporate ladder to climb, just hard problems to solve and a clear understanding of how we reward you for solving them.

Transparency without bureaucracy

Ultimately, we published our career map to solve a simple problem: to ensure you never have to wonder if you are being paid fairly and can focus thinking about the actual challenges we need to solve.

We want to give you the stability of clear compensation guardrails alongside the freedom, ownership, and speed of a startup. If you want to build an extraordinary product, take real responsibility, and be valued for the unique way you deliver impact, we’d love to have you on board.

Take a look at our Career Map, check out our open roles, and let's talk.