How RPay defines the compensation structure for guilds and team members¶

Our compensation plan is made up of two key elements: Levels and Steps

Levels¶

Levels set the responsibility grade and expectations of roles at our organization. They may be further defined by impact, seniority, knowledge, skills, or job title, and are often associated with a pay band.

Most companies struggle with seniorities and titles becoming too bureaucratic and confusing. This is why we are adopting a structure in levels that goes from 1 to 3 for non-Director roles and from 4 for Director roles. In this Handbook, we will not address L4.

• L1- Entry-level individual contributor: A professional who is learning technical and professional skills. In general, members in this level usually have less than three years of relevant experience.

In general, people in L1 share the following characteristics:

• Little or no work experience (1 to 3 years)
• Doing almost all tasks under supervision
• Performing tasks with little impact on the final product
• Focus on acquiring new skills and growing vertically

• Knowledge about the basics of the technologies, tools and methodology necessary for their profile

• L2 - Experienced individual contributors / Team Leaders: Early career, with basic skills developed; work contributes to the success of the team goals. In general, members in this level tend to have three to five years of relevant experience.

Members in this level show:

• Ability to produce quality in the content and codebases (if an engineer) and environments which they are working in
• Broad horizontal skills without being real experts in these other areas
• Taking initiative and being highly resourceful
• Skills in mentoring novices
• Lack the experience to prioritize the focus of their attention in the project
• Ability to deliver work with less supervision while being assigned to relatively routine tasks

• Ability to see the results of the occurring problems and learn how to avoid them in the future.

• L3 - Senior individual contributors and managers: Seasoned professional, with a variety of technical skills developed; strong problem solver; key for success of the team goals. In general, people in L3 tend to have five to seven years of relevant experience.

The level at which they demonstrate ownership (by pushing and delivering things in high quality and in a timely, consistent manner). Members in level 3 often show:

• Ability to coach, motivate and educate their peers
• Considerable impact on previous projects
• Responsibility for a project or a team
• Experience in mentoring their peers
• Vast knowledge in the business domain
• Good soft skills to find the balance between the client/user and the team
• A long-term vision of a product
• High levels of proactivity, solving problems before they arise
• Practicing deliberate work — continuously monitoring one’s own performance, and asking for feedback
• Adaptability — ability to excel in this chameleon-like behavior
• High level of motivation to work in your industry and develop your product

For engineering members in L3: - Knowledge in software architecture

• Being comfortable with multiple app technologies. They aim at acquiring transferable knowledge that will allow them to recognize and write good code in any programming language

• Ability to cover several specialties, like DevOps, product, operations, team management, sales, UI, or design. So they understand the bigger picture

• For example, they have written libraries that are used in critical components of software deployed for thousands of users

Steps¶

Within each level, we believe there's a place to have incremental steps to allow for more flexibility (more on this coming later). We define these as follows:

• Learning: Developing in the role to consistently meet expectations.
• Established: Meets expectations for the role.
• Thriving: Exceeds expectations for the role.
• Expert: Exceeding expectations consistently and ready for the next level.

We hire into the Learning step (S1) by default, although there can be some cases where the company strategically decides to hire in Established step (S2)

Why Levels and Steps matter?¶

Job levels help you make more strategic and consistent decisions around how you hire, engage, promote, retain, and sometimes even dismiss talent. It also helps with:

• Candidate offers: Candidate offers are easier to create and more consistent.
• Pay transparency: Each job level and step has a compensation band that we will be able to communicate to the candidates during the hiring process and to our current team members.
• Pay equity: Having a standardized compensation structure allows us to compensate our team members fairly without subjectivity or bias while we continue to make efforts to hire a diverse team.
• Budgeting: Compensation brackets help you translate hiring and member’s raise plans into budgets.

Guild leaders are responsible for allocating team members in the corresponding level and step according to their skills, years of experience and their performance.

IMPORTANT: We may adjust the total compensation without editing Step or Level if we consider the market rates for the underlying benchmark have gone up for certain roles.