April 9, 2025
As the marketplace moves specialty care from hospitals to homes, Float is built on the belief that exceptional healthcare requires exceptional technology. That’s why we jumped on the opportunity to sponsor the creation of Waypoints, an open-source career development framework that encourages engineers to place the real-world impact of their code at the forefront of their work—a key ingredient missing from most healthcare technologies.
Even better, the creator of Waypoints is our very own fractional CTO Dan Pupius, a veteran software engineer and entrepreneur with experience at Google, Medium, and his own startup Range. As Float’s CTO, his guiding philosophy is that healthy companies aren’t simply better places to work, but do better work.
Through Dan’s framework, we’re creating a technical foundation that our healthcare partners—from Optum and CVS to dozens of other specialty pharmacies—can depend on as we expand our network of skilled nurses delivering vital treatments in patients’ homes.
Want to know more about Waypoints and its potential for impact? Keep reading for a Q&A with its creator Dan Pupius.
Waypoints is a career development framework, or career ladder, for engineers. When we set out to build Waypoints, the goal was to help orient the engineering organization around traits and behaviors that actually benefit the business and the customers, while also supporting the creation of clear, fair, and scalable growth paths for our team.
A core principle of Waypoints is that engineers must develop a “product-mindset”—in other words, focusing on understanding user needs and outcomes rather than just technical solutions. This applies to all engineers, even those on the backend or DevOps teams, whose “users” might be internal teams or other systems that depend on their work.
There are two failure modes I’ve seen time and time again. The first is when engineers lack clarity about what is expected of them and how they can increase their impact. This can lead to misalignment between levels across teams, inconsistent promotion decisions, and ultimately retention challenges. The second failure mode is when career ladders incentivize behaviors that aren’t actually good for the product and the business—for example, building new systems purely for promotion credits instead of solving real user needs, or getting credit for shipping features that didn’t actually impact company performance.
This project is really about taking the lessons I’ve learned—sometimes painfully—across different organizational contexts and creating a resource that helps others avoid those same challenges.
The health industry isn’t especially well-known for having delightful, high-quality, high-performant products. The software here tends to be very utilitarian. Sometimes that’s necessary, but I think there’s also a missed opportunity. When the software is basically just a frontend to a database, it makes workflows more cumbersome, which in turn can impact the quality of care.
By embedding a product-centric mindset into engineering paths, we encourage engineers to understand the end-user and how they will engage with the system—whether it’s a patient, clinician, or care coordinator. Waypoints encourages engineers to think beyond the code to consider the real-world impact of their work.
I’ve developed a career ladder from the ground up twice in my career, and I’ve seen numerous other companies do so too. In my research, I also came across stories about companies rolling out ladders so poorly, they had to re-do it the following year. This can have a big impact on team morale.
By open-sourcing Waypoints, Float can benefit from input from other organizations, ensuring the ladder isn’t developed in isolation, while also allowing future organizations to benefit from the work. I hope that by inviting contributions from diverse organizations, we can ensure Waypoints stays relevant and comprehensive.
There’s a lot of talk about how AI is going to make engineers obsolete, but the truth is we’ve heard that multiple times over the last few decades. Every time there’s a major technological shift, what it means to be a software engineer changes.
My hope is that Waypoints can define fundamental attributes that are sustainable and persist through the next phase of software engineering. Software will still exist and need to be engineered—it just might not look like hand-writing code. But really, how different is that from the transition from assembly to higher level languages?
Ultimately, the fundamental skills of problem-solving, user understanding, and system thinking that Waypoints emphasizes will remain valuable even as the day-to-day work of engineers evolves significantly.
Additionally, Float has reached an inflection point in its growth where formalizing career paths has become necessary. We’re expanding our engineering team rapidly while maintaining our commitment to building a diverse, inclusive organization.
There’s also a cultural alignment. Float values transparency and equity, which are core principles of the Waypoints framework. By sponsoring this open-source project, we’re living those values—creating resources that benefit not just our company but the entire health tech ecosystem.
Finally, Float’s leadership team understood that investing in a project like this would yield returns beyond our immediate organizational needs. By contributing to the conversation about engineering careers in health tech, we’re helping to elevate the entire industry and attract more talent to solving healthcare’s complex challenges.
The technical challenges were also compelling. Building systems that integrate with healthcare workflows requires solving complex problems at the intersection of technology, human behavior, and regulatory requirements. This complexity creates opportunities for innovation that I found intellectually stimulating.
But ultimately, it was Float’s leadership team that convinced me. Float has assembled a group of leaders who combine deep healthcare expertise with technical acumen and genuine compassion. I saw the opportunity to work with people who are not only talented, but also deeply committed to making healthcare better at every touchpoint.
Second, balance specificity with flexibility. Your framework should provide clear guidance without becoming a rigid checklist. People grow in different ways, and your framework should accommodate various paths to impact.
Third, separate performance evaluation from development feedback. When these conversations are combined, the development aspect often gets overshadowed by compensation discussions. Instead, create distinct processes that allow for honest conversations about growth.
As Float’s network of skilled nurses expands across California and Arizona, we’re looking for forward-thinking healthcare partners who share our vision for a more patient-centered, technically robust healthcare ecosystem. If your organization is ready to join us in transforming specialty care delivery (and benefit from our commitment to engineering excellence), we’d love to connect! Reach the team at info@float.health.
For more information on Waypoints and to access the framework, please visit the Waypoints website: www.waypnts.com.
He has an MA in Industrial Design from Sheffield Hallam University and a BSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Manchester. In past lives he raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle.