The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

by Tanya Reilly

Big-picture thinking Big-picture thinking means being able to step back and take a broader view. It means seeing beyond the immediate details and understanding the context that you’re working in. It also means thinking beyond the current time, whether that means initiating yearlong projects, building software that will be easy to decommission, or predicting what your company will need in three years.

Execution At the staff level, the projects you take on will become messier and more ambiguous. They’ll involve more people and need more political capital, influence, or culture change to succeed.

Leveling up Every increase in seniority comes with more responsibility for raising the standards and skills of the engineers within your orbit, whether that’s your local team, colleagues in your organization, or engineers across your whole company or industry. This responsibility will include intentional influence through teaching and mentoring, as well as the accidental influence that comes from being a role model.

The local maximum, the best decision for a single group, might not be anything like the best decision when you take a broader view.

What About Architects? In some companies, “architect” is a rung on the technical track of the job ladder. In others, architects are abstract system designers who have their own career path, distinct from that of the engineers who implement the systems. In this book I’m going to consider software design and architecture to be part of the role of a staff+ engineer, but be aware that this is not universally true in our industry.

When a staff engineer and TPM work well together on a big project, they can be a dream team.

Whenever there’s a feeling of “someone should do something here,” there’s a reasonable chance that the someone is you.

You don’t have to love being around people to be a good leader. You do have to be a role model, though, and you have to treat people well.

In his article “Staff Archetypes”, Will Larson describes four distinct patterns he’s seen staff engineering roles take. You can use these archetypes as you define the kind of role you have, or would like to have:

Tech leads Partner with managers to guide the execution of one or more teams. Architects Responsible for technical direction and quality across a critical area. Solvers Wade into one difficult problem at a time. Right hands Add leadership bandwidth to an organization.

A technique I learned from my friend Cian Synnott is to write out my understanding of my job and share it with my manager.