Staff Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

My goal is to level up to Staff someday, and I feel like I've gotten a lot of very high-level advice and examples that are hard to directly apply. What are some detailed examples of Staff level projects, and what about the execution/behaviors made them Staff?

I am been working as a Senior software engineer for quite some time now. To move to the Staff level, one feedback/pointer I got was to start developing opinions on how to do certain things. When people start respecting your opinions, they start to see you as a leader.

The problem I have is, in many cases, I don't have enough relevant experience for the problem at hand. Also, I find, that in discussions I am listening more than I am speaking. Having no opinions, and finding it hard to express opinions for fear of being judged and losing respect in case my opinion is wrong, are the problems I am facing.

Is there any advice on how to develop these skills?

I recently got feedback from my manager, and they mentioned that to start making progress to E6, I need to come up with new initiatives, which are big projects spanning across multiple teams. This is especially important for us as our team works in a way where we need to come up with the roadmap more on our own in a bottoms-up fashion.

This feedback is one of the core pillars I want to focus on going forward, but it's hard to make it actionable. What can I concretely do to start coming up with these projects?

I've had 5+ friends leave Meta or quit software engineering altogether after E6. Either the responsibilities and stress were too much or what they were being asked to work on wasn't really aligned with their core interests. Business needs are always changing, so it can be a common occurrence to take a lot of ownership over a project you don't have personal interest in.

It's important to be adaptable, but I think intrinsic motivation can be hard to sustain if the people, project, or priorities are in flux.

For the older crowd, what really typifies career longevity in a software engineering?

This occurred to me at work today

I was working on a task for which I completed coding and and testing. I showed the code to some of our Staff engineer after standup. The first thing he asked me is why is this fix working. I did try to understand how my fix is working. However after I discussed this with him it was clear that my understanding was superficial. Apart from that, the fix I made even though it works in the current version might break if the library version is upgraded coz I am depending on some internal behavior.

Considering that I have 10 years of experience it felt very disappointing that I could not think of this on my own.

Any advice?

I have about 5 YOE and trying to grow from Senior -> Staff engineer but noticing that the path is taking longer than I'd hope.

This is the case whether I try to speak to other companies and ask about interviewing at that level or try to grow within my own company.

Within my own company: Requirements unclear, seems to be more time based (just keep on shipping). Since we're on the smaller side, we don't have a clearly defined structure like FAANG.

Externally: Due to the YOE, usually discussion of Staff isn't even an option even though I think I'm doing Staff level work. In fact, they usually decline the idea before even having a chance to explain what I'm working on.

The projects I'm working on span the entire org (startup), I have multiple mentees, and org-wide impact. I will be honest and say that I don't think the projects I work on are necessarily insanely technically complex (not going out to millions of users, dealing with hyper concurrency issues, or needing to deal with large scalability issues), but they do have a large amount of scope and senior+ level management required to run them.

I think from the project management perspective, I have things nailed down pretty well.

So I wonder if I'm either missing...

• YOE - Just some sort of arbitrary minimum that is being placed across the board for certain levels to be achieved
• Technical expertise - I definitely admit that I'm not necessarily INSANELY technical. For example, I can admit gaps like: I don't know how to design a concurrent document editing system like Google docs, or I wouldn't be able to write a live streaming service without reading up on the proper documentation and understanding better how those systems work. Are things like this a requirement to be a staff engineer? To just be more aware or know right away how various systems like this are designed, without needing to do research beforehand?

I'm essentially trying to understand what my gaps might be, and the technical aspect is one I'm unsure about how relevant it is.

Would appreciate any thoughts, especially from Staff+ engineers, maybe sharing what they feel makes them a Staff vs a Senior and how much technical skills play a role vs other elements.

Hi everyone,

A few years ago, I moved back to India from the UK for personal and family reasons, although I always appreciated the quality of life there.

Currently, I’m working at a US-based big tech company in India as a Tech Lead/Staff Engineer and the salary is top notch and in parity with Google/Microsoft for similar roles. While I’ve been a top performer, I’m struggling to settle down here, especially now that I have kids. I believe the UK offers them a better education and overall quality of life. However, despite strong referrals, I’ve been surprised by how difficult it’s been to get my profile noticed for new opportunities in the UK.

Recently, I received an offer from one of my previous employers. The work-life balance is appealing, but the salary is about the same as what I’m earning in India. Factoring in stock and other benefits, it’s actually less. Additionally, the offer involves a down-leveling, which I’m not too concerned about. Given the UK’s cost of living is at least three times higher than India’s, this is a tough decision.

After speaking with my current manager, I’ve managed to secure a fully remote role, which would significantly lower my living costs by about half. Plus, we’re also working on my promotion to Principal Engineer.

I’m wondering if I’m rushing to return to the UK. Should I hold out for a better opportunity?

PS: Financially I don't have a lot of savings until now.

Thanks,

I run into this from time to time where more Senior and Staff Engineers take interesting projects. I’m usually left with ones that take medium time and medium impact. How do I find projects for myself that expand my impact?

I have a L6 equivalent MLE interview from a FAANG company.

Since last time I had interview for L4. I would like to understand what kind of quality difference does L6 show in an interview (coding/behavioral/system design -- ML)?

How would you demonstrate staff level quality in the interview rounds?

We maintain a healthy suite of E2E tests, which does catch regressions sometimes before release.

It is hard to keep track of it all manually, but I believe that each time a regression is caught before release, it's overall positive on time spent. Each instance of this happening saves time which would have spent hot-fixing the issue in production if the regression wasn't able to be caught early by the tests.

How can I verify my hypothesis and make sure that this overall E2E testing effort is well-run, impactful, and net positive with engineering time investment?

It seems at Apple that getting promoted past ICT4 can take ages. My manager has 3x my YOE and many reports, but we're both ICT4. There is no leveling rubric that I can find, so it's unclear to me what differentiates an ICT5 from an ICT4 here. I'm thinking it might even just be worth abandoning the promo goal for the duration I work here, then aim to be hired into a promo at the next gig in a few years.

Often we talk about how, when getting feedback during a PR or Design Review, there are mistakes that I have seen, at least in my case, creep up repeatedly. Any tips to ensure that the learnings stick?