For a Staff engineer at a Big Tech company, what should their first 3-6 months look like?

• There's really no common onboarding plan or even overall playbook for a staff engineer as this is the level when engineers' paths really diverge. Junior -> senior is more foundational (i.e. there's more commonalities), and staff is when things get really different/crazy.
• Remember that a staff engineer is equivalent to the standard EM. This means that you are also responsible for the overall success of the team. If a staff engineer struggles, the team struggles. If a staff engineer crushes it, the team is probably doing well.
• Some commonalities of onboarding staff engineers:
  • Build deep relationships with the other staff engineers as they need to see you as a peer. Also build these relationships with the senior engineers on your team as a staff engineer is expected to lead senior engineers.
  • If you're working on the product side, get to know the PM. Other people to get to know are the designer, data scientist, and product marketing manager (if applicable).
  • You should be linked to a big technical project that spans across your entire team if not more.
• Artifacts after 3-6 months:
  • If the only recurring 1:1 you have is with your manager, then you have probably failed.
  • If you aren't the core POC on a major tech spec document, then you have also probably failed.
• Ideas to find staff level scope:
  • Improve the onboarding process for the entire team. Maybe built an interactive code playground to next-level it.
  • Optimize or create internal tools like a linter that help the entire team/org/company.
  • Go deep into the data to find an opportunity (i.e. creating scope) that uplifts the entire team and makes a substantial dent towards OKRs/KPIs.

Related resources:

• "How do I sell the vision behind a large, org-level project?"
• "How can I come up with big initiatives, especially those at a Staff level?"
• "How do I come up with innovative, impactful ideas and bring them to my team?"

What I've heard as a reasonable onboarding timeline for very senior folks [Staff+]:

• Your first half, you should operate as a senior engineer [E5]
• Your 2nd half, you should operate as a staff engineer [E6]
• Your 3rd half, you should operate as a senior staff engineer [E7]
• and so on...

For the very senior levels, it takes months to ramp up on the context / relationships to be effective.