The Journey to Staff Engineer In Big Tech - Q&A

This is the Q&A portion of the Staff Engineer Panel discussion. Watch the main content here.

The journey to Staff Engineer is unique for everybody. In this session, we talk about all the ways we got there! Senior Engineer is a terminal level at most tech companies.

Staff Engineer is the next level up. This is referred to as Staff at Meta/Google, or Principal Engineer at Amazon/Microsoft.

Questions answered in the video:

• I'm making a career change into Software Engineering -- what advice would you have? I want to get into Augmented/Virtual Reality.
• I'm already a Staff Engineer, but I'm struggling with performance management. What advice would you have to exceed expectations?
• What resources would you recommend to improve at communication? What is an effective way to find a mentor?
• I'd like to first become a Tech Lead (TL) and then transition into a Staff Engineer role. What advice would you have for me?
• I'm a Data Engineer (DE) and big fan of Zach! How do I show the impact of my work to a manager who may be unfamiliar, especially since I don't do frontend?

See discussions about Staff Engineers on Taro: https://www.jointaro.com/topic/staff-engineer/

Publicly available promotion stories:

• Ryan's Instagram video processing improvements
• Rahul's internal tool for debugging

Panelists:

• Zach Wilson
• Rahul Pandey
• Carly Taylor
• Lee McKeeman
• Ryan Peterman