The Staff Engineer's Career Roadmap
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Grow, influence, and advance as a technical leader
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Evaluate your readiness for staff engineering roles
- Create a strategic career development plan for reaching a staff position
- Build effective influence and visibility across engineering organizations
- Measure and demonstrate staff-level impact through concrete examples
- Understand the current hiring landscape for staff engineering roles
- Tailor your resume and interview skills for success
Course description
The path to becoming a staff engineer—where you can expand your technical impact while remaining hands-on with code—is often unclear and inconsistently defined across companies.
Join expert Krys Flores to learn what it takes to land a staff engineering role. Career-minded engineers will get clear guidance on building influence, demonstrating impact, and navigating the unique challenges of senior technical leadership.You’ll explore the three common paths to staff engineering and assess which route best fits your circumstances. Through analysis of industry leveling guides, practical exercises in building visibility, and strategies for demonstrating staff-level impact, you'll develop a personalized roadmap for advancement. For those considering external opportunities, you’ll examine the staff hiring landscape, learn how to position your experience effectively, and get prepared for the unique challenges of staff engineering interviews.
This live event is for you because...
- You’re an engineer looking to move up the IC track.
- You’re an engineering manager or director considering a transition back to an IC role.
- You’re a direct manager of engineers and want to understand how to guide candidates for promotion.
Prerequisites
- Three or more years of software engineering experience
- Experience or desire to lead technical projects
- Familiarity with software architecture and system design
Recommended preparation:
- Access to your company’s engineering levels document, or the ability to use a provided levels document (link to come)
- (Optional) Examples of technical and nontechnical challenges you’re facing
Recommended follow-up:
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Foundations (15 minutes)
- Presentation: What is a staff engineer?; overview of resources for becoming a staff+ engineer
Three paths to staff (15 minutes)
- Presentation: The paths (promotion, being hired into the position, and switching ladders within the same company)
- Q&A
Leveling, Part I (45 minutes)
- Presentation: Industry overview; senior versus staff expectations and key skills (independence, business impact, leadership and influence, deep technical vector)
- Q&A
- Break
Leveling, Part II (40 minutes)
- Presentation: Industry benchmarks; sample leveling guide, with emphasis on senior versus staff
- Hands-on exercise: Complete your own leveling guide
- Q&A
- Break
Building visibility (45 minutes)
- Presentation: Current versus future perception and visibility sheet; key communication skills for fostering visibility (technical design docs, weekly updates, interviewing, kudos); finding a sponsor; external branding
- Hands-on exercise: Complete your perception/visibility sheet
- Q&A
- Break
Stay or go (10 minutes)
- Presentation: Challenges with internal promotion; decisions
Targeting roles and tailoring your resume (35 minutes)
- Presentation: The state of the industry and current trends; What kind of staff roles/companies should I target?; senior-level resume versus staff+-level impact resume
- Q&A
Staff interviewing expectations and challenges (25 minutes)
- Presentation: What staff engineering interviews involve and what hiring managers expect; how to prepare and practice; common interview questions
- Q&A
Takeaways (10 minutes)
- Presentation: Charting your next steps and following through
Your Instructor
Krys Flores
Krys Flores is a staff software engineer at Crunchyroll who brings a historian’s perspective to engineering leadership. Despite having no formal CS education, she’s built a remarkable career at companies like Lob and Nordstrom while advocating for diversity and equal pay. A frequent speaker, she’s been featured in the #NothingLess documentary and hosted the Staff Plus track at QCon San Francisco 2023. Through her talks and mentoring, she champions making tech more accessible to underrepresented communities. A systems design enthusiast by day and British murder mystery fan by night, Krys calls San Francisco home—even though she remains a proud LA Dodgers fan.