The Staff Engineer's Path

Chapter 1. What Would You Say You Do Here?

The idea of a staff engineer track, or “technical track”, is new to a lot of companies. Organizations differ on what attributes they expect of their most senior engineers and what kind of work those engineers should do. Although most agree that, as Silvia Botros has written, the top of the technical track is not just “more-senior seniors,” we don’t have a shared understanding of what it is. So we’ll start this chapter by getting existential: why would an organization want very senior engineers to stick around? Then, armed with that understanding, we’ll unpack the role: its technical requirements, its leadership requirements, and what it means to work autonomously.

Staff engineering roles come in a lot of shapes. There are many valid ways to do the job. But some shapes will be a better fit for some situations, and not all organizations will need all kinds of staff engineers. So I’ll talk about how to characterize and describe a staff engineering role: its scope, depth, reporting structure, primary focus, and other attributes. You can use these descriptions to be precise about how you want to work, what kind of role you’re looking to grow into, or who you need to hire. Finally, since different companies have different ideas of what a staff engineer should do, we’ll work on aligning your understanding with that of other key people in your organization.

Let’s start with what this job even is.

What Even Is a Staff Engineer?

If the only career ...