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Creating-Specialized-Roles

4 min readStatus:Seedling

Creating Specialized Roles

Creating a specialized engineering role — security engineer, data engineer, ML engineer, technical program manager — sounds straightforward. In practice it is one of the harder organizational design challenges a manager faces. The default mental model (“we need a security person, let’s hire one”) consistently underestimates how much system design is required before the first hire.

Why It’s Harder Than It Appears

Specialized roles don’t fit the existing “software engineer” mold that most engineering organizations are built around. Every system that works for generalist engineers — compensation bands, career ladders, interview loops, manager feedback, team identity — must be rebuilt or adapted for the new role. Skip that design work and the role will struggle regardless of how talented the hire is.

Eight Challenges to Navigate

  1. Role definition vagueness — scope conflicts with adjacent roles; success criteria are undefined
  2. Compensation parity problems — specialists (e.g., security hires from security firms, data scientists from academia) often come from different market rate structures than the software engineering ladder
  3. Career progression gaps — no specialized ladder exists; specialists cannot see a path forward
  4. Hiring pipeline mismatch — interview processes designed for software engineers screen out strong specialists or fail to identify them
  5. Integration friction — embedded in product teams vs. centralized specialist team each have distinct effectiveness profiles requiring deliberate org design
  6. Identity conflicts — a specialist embedded in a team that didn’t request them must constantly prove technical credibility
  7. Manager experience gaps — most engineering managers lack domain knowledge to coach or evaluate specialists fairly
  8. Retention after investment — once specialists are trained and demonstrably valuable, competitors recruit them aggressively

Six Success Factors

  1. Define success criteria before creating the role — not after the first hire has started
  2. Create a dedicated career ladder for the specialisation before recruiting begins (see Career-Level-Dynamics)
  3. Build a specialised hiring process with domain-appropriate evaluation criteria
  4. Establish a community of practice so specialists learn from each other and maintain professional identity (see Communities-of-Learning)
  5. Designate an explicit manager who has or will deliberately build domain knowledge
  6. Plan the org design (centralized team vs. embedded) with explicit trade-off analysis before the role goes live

Embedded vs. Centralized Trade-off

  • Centralized specialist team: stronger specialist identity, peer learning, consistent standards, career path visibility; risk of isolation from product context
  • Embedded in product teams: faster integration, higher product impact, better context; risk of identity erosion, inconsistent standards, manager feedback gaps

Neither model is universally better. The choice depends on the organization’s maturity with the specialisation and the degree of domain-specific judgment required day-to-day.

Key Insight

Design the system before the first hire, not after. Role definition, career ladder, hiring process, org structure, and manager preparation are all prerequisites — not follow-up work. When these are built reactively, the role absorbs organizational debt from day one (see Performance-Management-System).

Sources

  • Larson, Will (2019). An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Stripe Press. ISBN: 978-1-7322651-8-9.

    • Chapter 6.7: Creating specialized roles — eight challenges and six success factors

  • Hackman, J. Richard and Greg R. Oldham (1976). “Motivation through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory.” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 250–279. DOI: 10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7.

    • Foundational job characteristics model (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, feedback) underpins what makes specialist roles motivating or demotivating when poorly designed

  • Skelton, Matthew and Manuel Pais (2019). Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. IT Revolution Press. ISBN: 978-1-942788-81-9.

    • Enabling teams and platform teams as organizational patterns for embedding vs. centralizing specialists; directly addresses integration friction and identity challenges

  • Forsgren, Nicole, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim (2018). Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps. IT Revolution Press. ISBN: 978-1-942788-33-1.

    • Research on how specialist roles (security, platform, data) integrate into delivery organizations; supports the embedded vs. centralized design question

  • Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) (2022). “Job Design.” SHRM HR Knowledge Center. Retrieved March 2026. Available: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/toolkits/pages/managingorganizationaldesignandstructure.aspx

    • Practitioner framework for role creation, job scoping, and career ladder design; relevant to success factors 1–3

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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