Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

by Will Larson

Tech Leads are the most common Staff archetype and lead one team or a cluster of teams in their approach and execution. They’re comfortable scoping complex tasks, coordinating their team towards solving them, and unblocking them along the way. Tech Leads often carry the team’s context and maintain many of the essential cross-team and cross-functional relationships necessary for the team’s success. They’re a close partner to the team’s product manager and the first person called when the roadmap needs to be shuffled. Earlier in their career, they will have implemented their team’s most complex technical projects, but at this point, they default to delegating such projects across the team. They do this both to grow their teammates and in acknowledgment that the team’s impact grows as the Tech Lead’s coding blocks shrink. While they’re coding less, they are still the person defining their team’s technical vision, and stepping in to build alignment within the team on complex issues.