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

by Tanya Reilly

I’ll unpack the staff engineer role by looking at what I think of as its three pillars: big-picture thinking, execution of projects, and leveling up the engineers you work with.

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. We can think of these three pillars as supporting your impact like in Figure P-2. Figure

Three pillars of staff engineer roles.

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

Your locator map can help you make sure the teams you work with really understand their purpose in the organization, who their customers are, and how their work affects other people.

Your topographical map can help highlight the friction and gaps between teams and open up the paths of communication. Your treasure map can help you make sure everyone knows exactly what they’re trying to achieve and why.

Paying attention means being alert to facts that affect your projects or organization. And that means continually sifting information out of the noise around you. If you can train your brain to say “That’s interesting!” and remember facts that you might need later on, you’ll start to add detail to your maps and build skills in synthesizing new information.

company all-hands presentation about an upcoming marketing push might be a hint that huge traffic spikes you’re not ready for are coming your way. Your director asks you to take on a project you don’t have time to do, but you know which senior engineers in your organization are ready for opportunities to stretch their skills. A shift in corporate priorities could mean a platform you’d considered but backburnered has become an amazing investment. Your database just disappeared, and you remember getting an email about network maintenance.

make their own decisions and champion

The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group (now part of Google Cloud) has shown that high-trust cultures that emphasize information flow have better software delivery performance. It’s not surprising that an increasing number of software companies aim to have a generative culture. That means encouraging cooperative cross-functional teams, learning from blameless postmortems, encouraging experimentation, taking calculated risks, and breaking down silos. If your organization works like this, you’re going to have an easier time sharing information and making progress.

I love asking for an “ELI5,” a term that comes from Reddit and means “Explain it like I’m five years old.” It’s a helpful shortcut to mean “Look, rather than guessing my level of understanding, just spell it out for me.

There’s a Martin Fowler quote that I love: “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Individual Group Catalyst Advice Mentoring, sharing knowledge, feedback Tech talks, documentation, articles Mentorship program, tech talk events Teaching Code review, design review, coaching, pairing, shadowing Classes, codelabs Onboarding curriculum, teaching people to teach Guardrails Code review, change review, design review Processes, linters, style guides Frameworks, culture change Opportunity Delegating, sponsorship, cheerleading, ongoing support Sharing the spotlight, empowering your team Creating a culture of opportunity, watching with pride as your superstar junior colleagues change the world

that teams don’t step off that “paved road.” I like the format popularized by the Thoughtworks Tech Radar, marking technologies as “Adopt,” “Trial,” “Access,” and “Hold.”

Figure 9-2. Choosing where to put this year’s ability points.

Whether you’re learning Whether you’re investing in transferable skills or navigating dysfunction

How you feel about recruiting other people to your team How confident you feel How stressed you feel

We all have good weeks and bad weeks, so one model I’ve recommended to friends is to track these metrics over a few months (see Table 9-1) and see how things are trending over time. Table 9-1. Tracking the signals of job health described in Cate Huston’s “5 signs it’s time to quit your job”