How to ensure that I have Staff scope in a startup?
Hey! I am joining a startup as a Staff Engineer. I understand, titles can be inflated at a start up. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get to staff at big tech, without a supportive team.
My eventual goal is to be a staff engineer at a FAANG, or a very high achieving Senior at a FAANG. I want to use this startup "Staff" as a way to really hone my skills, learn and grow. Purely focussing on my love for coding, software engineering and learning, and not motivated by money.
Keeping the above in mind, how can I ensure, I have staff level scope ( & not just a title) at this startup.
And any tips for successful onboarding at a startup helps, from your personal experience.! ( Yes, I went through Rahul's course already :) )
It is a series B start up, with 70 people.
Discussion
(2 comments)- 1
5 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroThe playbook to onboarding/get good scope is effectively the same for Staff engineers - It's just that it's more important for you to really nail it:
- Talk to a lot of people and build up relationships - Strive to become the friendliest face on the team, so people want you to succeed. And when people want you to succeed, they'll give you the best projects. Follow the advice here: [Masterclass] How To Build Deep Relationships Quickly In Tech
- Do very high-quality work - It is hard to win with quantity when onboarding as the codebase is entirely new (but hey, if you can code machine and put out a ton of commits, do it). Quality is way easier to control as it's just another 30-60 minutes of effort to craft a good PR and talk to teammates about optimal implementation strategy. If you develop a reputation as a master craftsperson, people will feel safe giving you the best projects knowing you won't fumble them. Follow the advice here: [Course] Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer
- Be curious, ask questions, and keep an eye out for problems - As a Staff engineer, the expectation is that you can find also juicy project opportunities instead of merely waiting for them to come to you. In general, you always want to attack the problem from multiple fronts - In this case, you want both inbound (i.e. a project comes to you) and outbound (i.e. you find an opportunity and send out a proposal to work on it) projects. For outbound, it's often better to just start working on the opportunity in your 10-20% time and share it after it's gotten some traction (better to ask for forgiveness than permission). Here's a good thread about creating scope: "How do I come up with innovative, impactful ideas and bring them to my team?"
- 14 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
Since you're joining a Series B startup, an interesting idea is that the company is going to enter a transition period to define various processes as it continues scaling and hiring.
This is a golden opportunity for you, given your Big Tech background (at least at Intuit). You could own the process for various parts of the engineering experience, for example:
- Code review (and code ownership)
- The release process
- Alerting and dashboards
And a lot more! I'd start by contrasting where your prior companies had really good processes, and figure out how you can bring parts of that into the startup.
This is a great opportunity for Staff+ promotions, as I explain in this lesson of the course :)
