Introduction

Technology companies are kind of like sports teams. It takes a mix of highly talented people with a broad range of skills and experience to have a chance of success in a highly competitive industry.

There is a lot of media focus placed on the technical talent within tech – the software engineers, data scientists etc – but there is a wide range of roles that are vitally important for success, including many that are available to people with non-technical backgrounds.

How products/services influence roles

The specific job roles you will find in a given technology company will be based on the products or services they offer, and as a company grows in scale these differences will become even more pronounced.

A newly-founded software startup could be operating very lean with a handful of software engineers, someone handling support, another taking care of marketing and so on. As they grow they will increase the headcount within these existing roles, but they will also start to encounter issues that will demand them to start hiring in new areas like operations, sales, legal and human resources.

A hardware-focused technology company, like the fitness tracking device Whoop, will require a different mix of talent from the start. To bring a hardware product to market they will likely need to hire industrial designers, engineers, supply chain experts and so on.

Technology companies that reach national and global scale will start to make their own specialized hires. For example, Uber is known to employ economists who model and optimize their rider/driver marketplaces. This role would not have made sense back in 2009 when Uber was Ubercab, a private hire car app operating within a few suburbs of San Francisco.

But Uber now operates in hundreds of markets across the world, so if in-house economists can provide even relatively “minor” optimizations they can have a big impact on Uber’s key metrics, and are worth hiring.

Generalists vs specialists

As the job titles become more specialized in larger technology companies, so do the job descriptions.

Startups are inherently resource constrained, so early hires will generally need to work on a wide range of activities that may be outside of their core role. I’s not uncommon for startup teams to share customer support responsibilities, or for early marketing hires to be responsible for defining a brand strategy, designing creative and setting up advertising campaigns on Instagram, and writing content for the company blog.

As the tech company grows in size you would expect each of these activities to be taken over by a specialist (and later, team of specialists) who can focus their full attention and skillset on one area.

The scale of the company will also help to define whether certain roles are required. As an example, a corporate development team focuses on potential mergers and acquisitions and can be strategically important in mature companies with the financial resources to buy other companies, but would be unnecessary in your average early-stage startup.

How roles in tech are typically organised

With all this in mind, it’s difficult to give one example of how the job roles within a “tech company” are organized. But for the sake of example, if we could peek inside a mid-size software-focused technology company we would expect to find people working within a few general groups or departments:

• Leadership : Founders/Executives/Senior Management
• Engineering : including Development and Quality Assurance
• Product Management
• Customer Support/Success
• Marketing
• Sales
• Growth (will sometimes fall within marketing)
• Business & corporate development
• Shared service/operations (incl. People Operations/HR, Finance, Legal etc)

Within each group you would find people working in a range of managerial and specialized roles. For example, a marketing department would have marketing managers responsible for setting strategy and providing direction to the marketing team, while also having specialists like an SEO Lead who is fully focused on improving the company’s organic user acquisition metrics.

Now that we’ve spent some time covering how tech companies are organized we can start our tour through the various roles, technical and non-technical, that are commonly found within the companies. For the purpose of simplicity we’ll be looking at these roles from the perspective of a company that develops software products.

Let’s get started.