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

by Tanya Reilly

One way to keep a project moving is to have someone who feels ownership for the whole thing, rather than any of its individual parts.

When you’re making technical decisions, you need to understand the trade-offs and help other people understand them too. You need to be able to dive into the details where necessary, ask the right questions, and understand the answers.

Staff engineers often take on ambiguous, messy, difficult problems and do just enough work on them to make them manageable by someone else. Once the problem is tractable, it becomes a growth opportunity for less experienced engineers (sometimes with support from the staff engineer).

Be prepared to ignore your scope when there’s a crisis: there is no such thing as “not my job” during an outage,

At the staff engineer level, though, everything you do has a high opportunity cost, so your work needs to be important.

Amazon’s principal engineer group acknowledges this in one of its community tenets: “Respect what came before”.

Time Everything you commit to has an opportunity cost. By choosing to do one thing, you’re implicitly choosing not to do another.

we spend a lot of our lives at work, and it’s reasonable to want to feel good about it. If you enjoy the kind of work you’re doing and the people you’re working with, that will be a boost to your quality of life every day.