Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track

by Will Larson

If you want to boil it all down to one concise tip: send an early draft to an executive attending the meeting and ask them what to change.

Most technology companies have a “career level,” which is intended to be the highest level that most folks achieve. Senior engineer is the career level at most companies. While you might get let go for not moving from entry-level engineer to mid-level engineer quickly enough, most companies have no expectation that you’ll ever go from Senior to Staff. Six years at mid-level? Ah, that’s a problem. Twenty years at Senior? Sure, that’s fine.

A Staff engineer isn’t a better Senior engineer, but someone who’s moved into fulfilling one of the Staff archetypes.

About two-thirds of the Staff engineers I surveyed attained their title as a promotion at the company they were already working at, and the remaining third changed companies to attain the title.

One inconvenient reality you’ll encounter in pursuit of a Staff role is that opportunity at any given company is unevenly distributed. If your company leadership views infrastructure engineering as inherently “more complex” or “more leveraged” than product engineering, then opportunity will consolidate within infrastructure teams. If you work in an organization that emphasizes shipping features, then it will be easier to be rewarded for fixing an outage you cause than preventing future outages. Your work will be more visible if you work in your company’s headquarters than in a distributed office.

It’s much simpler to align your approach with these unspoken currents rather than reroute the river creating them.

It’s easy to view this as a critical, life-changing decision, but that’s probably overthinking it a bit.

Most companies understand that management isn’t the right role for everyone and will be glad to let you rotate back into an engineering role.

Charity argues that “manager career path vs engineering career path” is a false dichotomy, and taking time to alternate between both roles makes you better at both.

As a final caveat, Staff-plus titles are leadership positions. It’s uniquely challenging to gain a leadership position if the existing leadership team doesn’t identify with you as a potential member. What that means is, unfortunately, folks with the privilege of seeming like they are already part of the existing leadership team have a much easier time making the transition.

Some folks think of their promotion packet as the capstone of reaching a Staff-plus role, but I’ve seen many folks succeed by taking the opposite approach: starting to write their first Staff promotion packet long before they think they’re likely to be promoted to Staff, much the way they might use a brag document. Used this way, your packet becomes the map to accomplishing your goal.

Many folks choose not to pursue the Staff level; you should have a reason why this is important to you.

One of the things that I tell them is to be super open and honest with their manager about what you want from your career. A mistake I made early on in my one-on-ones was telling my manager what I thought they wanted to hear, instead of what I actually felt.”

Wait two days, reread your promotion packet and edit for content, clarity, and context

Share your promotion packet with several trusted peers to get feedback, preferably peers already in a Staff-plus role. Peers are often better at identifying your strengths and contributions than you are, and they are closer to your work than your manager might be

Share your promotion packet with your manager and ...

It’s common to view promotion systems through the lens of other systems that have evaluated us throughout our lives such as school, but this falsely frames performance evaluation as a solo activity. Whether your company does ad-hoc promotions or uses a calibration process, promotions are a team activity and as Julia Grace, then of Slack, advised me once during a job search, “Don’t play team games alone, you’ll lose.”

One of the things that I tell them is to be super open and honest with your manager about what you want from your career. A mistake I made early on in my one-on-ones was telling my manager what I thought they wanted to hear, instead of what I actually felt.

Ask your sponsor how you can support their sponsorship. Owning your career isn’t only about asking for things.

Build a relationship over time, and put in the work to help them when they need your support. Stay aligned with their initiatives. Suppose they need folks to join a working group, volunteer, and put in the work.

You’re hardly doomed, but your promotion clock will likely get reset as you build a relationship with your new manager. (Sometimes, this works out the other way, with your new manager working hard to prove themselves to you by advocating on your behalf.)

Even to give public conference talks or know that “I’ve done X and could do X again.”

early in your career, you’re given well-defined problems, but as you get deeper into it, you’ll increasingly encounter poorly defined or undefined problems, and Staff projects will generally start with a poorly scoped but complex and important problem.

In any case, it’s worth keeping in mind that whether or not these projects are required, they are also some of the most challenging work you can find and are the sort of work that will stretch and develop you into a better engineer. In the short-term pursuit of the title, it may well be optimal to avoid these projects, but in the long-term pursuit of self-growth, they’re irreplaceable.

To reach senior levels, you have to become effective at not only entering but also staying in these rooms of power.

To get into the room, you need:

To bring something useful to the room…

…that the room doesn’t already have.

Small groups function better than larger ones, so operating forums generally sacrifice redundancy and representation for efficiency.

A sponsor in the room.

To get into the room, you’ll need someone to sponsor your membership. Your sponsor is allocating their social capital towards your inclusion, and their peers will judge them based on your actions within the room.

Your sponsor needs to know you want to be there. Your sponsor is probably in many different rooms and probably daydreams of leaving most of those meetings behind them. They won’t necessarily assume you want to be in any particular meeting, and in fact might assume you don’t want to be there at all. Make sure that they know if you want to be included.

Whether someone with similar context is already in the room is also unique to your circumstances, and at some points in time, the only options are to wait or look for another room to enter.

If you’re particularly aligned, they’re more likely to yield their own seat to you and stop attending.

Learn to speak concisely: as you develop an economy of speech, you’ll be able to contribute more ideas with less time. Learn to speak clearly: if folks don’t understand your proposal, then it doesn’t matter how good it is. Keep in mind that it’s your obligation to be understood, not the obligation of everyone else to understand you.

Come prepared. Some companies infantilize their engineers, accepting that even very senior engineers won’t read the agenda, do the pre-reads or prepare for the discussion. There’s a considerable gap between what’s tolerated and what’s rewarded, and you’ll stand out if you take the time to organize your thoughts before each meeting. Equally important is following up on what you committed to.

Each room has its own purpose, and you’ll create friction if you attempt to use a room against the existing group’s intent.

Effective groups are formed from individuals who are willing to disagree and commit.

Embarrassing your sponsor. Remember that you got into a room because someone in the room advocated for your inclusion.

That said, I think it’s easy to get caught up worrying too much about staying in the room. Sometimes you’re better off thinking about whether the room’s a valuable place to invest your time.

It’s important to remember that while there are infinite rooms to be in, there’s no room where the work actually happens.

While exiting, sponsor someone else into the opportunity you’re leaving behind.

One of the most effective ways to get luckier is to be more visible within your organization.

A big part of being promoted to Staff is making sure that your work is visible, that people know your name and you have a good reputation.

The existing members of that team want to be comfortable that they’re expanding their ranks with folks they believe in, and they can’t believe in you if they don’t know you.

Write and distribute more long-lived documents, like architecture docs or technical specification Lead (and, to a lesser extent, participate in) company forums like architecture reviews, company all hands, and learning circles Be a cheerleader for your team’s and peers’ work on Slack You can also cheerlead via email instead of Slack Share weekly notes of your work to your team and stakeholders in a way that other folks can get access to your notes if they’re interested Contribute to your company’s blog Attend, or potentially even host, office hours for your team or org

There are many successful Staff-plus engineers with no external presence, but many find external visibility contributes to their career.

In terms of how to create this sort of visibility for yourself and your work, it could be giving a conference talk like Keavy McMinn or Dan Na, going on a podcast like Michelle Bu, turning a problem into a website and book like Katie Sylor-Miller’s ohshitgit, or creating a mailing list like Stephen Whitworth’s High Growth Engineering.

If so, work to clear that threshold, but not much further. Visibility is a transient currency. Learning and developing yourself is a permanent one; focus on the latter once you’ve done the minimum to clear the former’s cliff.

Conversely, when you interview for new roles, you can keep interviewing until you find a company that’s able to grant the title. You can also deliberately choose to interview at earlier stage companies who are likely to value your experience more highly.