The Staff Engineer Track — Scope, Influence, Strategy and Judgment
Most engineering courses teach you to build things. This one is about a…
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#staff-engineer
14 posts
Getting to Staff and Staying
We’ve covered the craft of staff engineering, scope, strategy, writing…
Architecture and Technical Health
Features get celebrated; technical health gets ignored until it’s a crisis. One…
Incidents, Risk and Judgment
Everything breaks eventually, no matter how good your architecture. When it does…
Glue Work and Leverage
Every project has work that isn’t in anyone’s job description and isn’t in the…
Mentorship and Sponsorship
Ask any successful engineer how they got their break, and the story almost…
Influence Without Authority
Here’s the hard truth at the center of the staff IC path: you can’t make anyone…
Driving Cross-Team Projects
The project that earns someone a staff promotion is usually a cross-team one: a…
Making Technical Decisions
Staff engineering is, more than anything, a job of judgment, making good calls…
Writing That Changes Decisions
Ask a group of senior engineers what separates the staff engineers they admire…
What a Staff Engineer Actually Does
Early in my career I thought “staff engineer” just meant “a senior engineer who…
Scope, Impact and Altitude
In the last lesson I said the staff failure mode is “being busy on work that…
Technical Strategy and Vision
“We need a technical strategy” is one of the most common things you’ll hear as…
Staff Engineer Study Plan for MAANG Interviews — The Complete 12-Week Roadmap
If you’re a Senior Engineer (L5) preparing for Staff (L6+) roles at MAANG…