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

I completed my final rounds at Meta. I heard back from the recruiter on the same day pretty quickly that they would like to set up a call and asked for Meta references. Is this a good sign? How important are the references?

I interviewed at a big startup that recently IPO'd and was offered a staff engineer role verbally after the interview loop concluded. I've been in touch with the recruiter to get a formal offer for around 3 weeks now but it just keeps getting delayed.

Questions:-

• Does getting the actual offer take such a long duration (2-3 weeks post verbal confirmation) at relatively bigger companies? I've only worked at startups and scaleups before.
• I have other offers that might expire soon but I don't want to take a call without this offer. I've shared this with the recruiter but I feel it hasn't helped expedite the process. Do I keep following up or give up on this offer and work with the rest of offers?

I have Staff interviews lined up with FAANG companies and would like to learn from the best resources out there. What has helped you the most in your journey/experience?

1. Team Charter: Overview of our mission and values?
2. Milestones: Key goals for 2 weeks, 2 months, 6 months - clear success indicators?
3. Key Contacts: Priority teams and individuals for relationship-building; schedule meetings? Essential tech leads and engineers contacts for insights across the org?
4. Priorities: Weekly/quarterly priorities and alignment with company goals?
5. Challenges: Major team challenges and my role in addressing them?
6. Time Allocation: Expected distribution of my time across tasks?
7. Learning Resources: Key documents or experiments to review?
8. Project Ideas: Prospective projects and their scope (T-shirt sizing)?
9. Performance Criteria: Access to the performance and progression rubric?
10. Meeting Cadence: Preferred frequency for one-on-one meetings with manager, skip and peers?
11. Feedback Schedule: Ideal timing for feedback sessions for peers, manager, and skip?
12. Communication Preference: Written or verbal communication preference? Anything else?
13. Asking for Help: Procedure and contact for assistance; onboarding buddy?
14. Proactivity & Dynamics: Steps to proactivity and understanding organizational dynamics?
15. Current Focus: Main current team issue or project?
16. Recent & Future Work: Recent achievements and future plans (month, quarter, year)?
17. Innovation Opportunities: Any tool/process gaps I can fill with a new solution?
18. Team Charter Feedback: My understanding of our mission and KPIs; do you agree?
19. People to Meet: List of essential PM's and people to influence across org teams.
20. Project Ideas: Observations and potential impact with rough T-shirt sizing.

Anything else, also please reply if you were my manager if you can Alex + Rahul?

Before I was at Amazon in Cambridge, England. I came to enjoy the quality of life there, but recent changes made me switch to Salesforce in India. The work-life balance here is good, but even as a staff engineer, I’m having trouble finding scope - I own just a small piece of the overall system my team’s responsible for.

I was able to recently get an offer from Spotify for a UK office, which expires in a month. However, it’s for Software Engineer 2, a level below their senior level. This isn’t ideal as one of my goals is to be a Staff engineer at a reputable company.

Should I stay at Salesforce where I’m already a Staff level and have solid work-life balance or move back to the UK to work for Spotify?

Hi All,

Provided one is working full time it might not be possible to market your product or side projects on professional networking sites like LinkedIn mainly because it may ring a bell and other obvious reasons.

I think other social platforms like Reddit and Twitter can work and are relatively safer in terms of getting noticed my your manager or company folks.

One option I can think of is to ask your friends or hire a marketing person to do this for you but it will cost me.

Curious to know the opinion from others. Thanks,

At a previous company, a friend had an exceptional mentor who helped him climb from mid-level to senior engineer in 1.5 years. I’ve struggled to find a mentor of similar caliber. What advice do you have for finding a good mentor?

I’m currently relatively happy in my current role working on challenging problems, I like my technical peers and management and during my 3 years here I got promoted from entry level engineer to senior engineer (SD1 to SD3).

However, given the scope and impact I provide, it feels like I can potentially make ~100k more (50% increase) with a job hop talking to multiple recruiters.

The worry is that I lose the equity I built in my current role and be exposed to layoffs at the new company. Also, getting promoted to staff engineer for a similar compensation increase would probably take a while. I’m tempted to switch jobs to maximize compensation.

The Hack language is indeed associated with PHP but it's not exactly a new version of PHP. Instead, Hack is a programming language developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) that operates within the same ecosystem as PHP and is designed to interoperate with PHP code. Hack extends PHP by adding additional features such as static typing, type inference, generics, nullable types, and async programming, among others.

Hack aims to maintain the fast development cycle of PHP while offering the added reliability of static typing, enhancing both performance and safety. It was developed to address some of the shortcomings and challenges of working with large PHP codebases, especially in a fast-paced development environment. Hack and PHP codes can coexist, allowing developers to gradually migrate PHP codebases to Hack, providing a smooth transition pathway without requiring a full rewrite. Meta originally developed Hack to run on the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), which is used to execute both Hack and PHP code, significantly improving execution times compared to the standard PHP interpreter.

For example, this week I was told to work on adding a field to some legacy entity which is not recommended (i.e. you need to have a solid business justification). The whole process is very lengthy, requiring many layers of approval just for this single field change. How can I find the scope appropriate to my level?

Hi All

Some companies have a project deep dive interviews as part of the hiring loop interviews and I was looking for any good resources about how to structure and be well prepared for these interviews. Appreciate any pointers.

Note: I have seen this predominantly for Staff+ positions.

Thanks

Rahul

I’d like to be a very senior research engineer in a FAANG company. I’m currently a senior engineer at my medium-sized company but I want to move closer to the research side as a more senior IC. What does it look like to be Staff+ research engineer vs software engineer? How can I build those skills now?

I was looking in the questions but couldn't find anything about it. There is a ton of info in the internet about bottom-top approach but still can't understand how it works in reallity. Any actual example projects would be great. I read many times that you as Senior/Staff should convince team/teams in an idea/project, and this is one of the ways to get promoted. An example - Staff Engineer created scope for 20+ people and worked on feature X. So my questions there:

• How does it happen?
• Is there any management involved here?

I've always worked for top-bottom companies and even if we have an idea for a feature/improvement, eventually the management decides if we should go for it or not. After all, the management is the one "holding" the budget.

I am not sure if we have a option of 1:1 mentoring.

I have been generalist my whole career, I have moved from front end web development --> platform as a service web development --> microservices cloud development and now as a ML engineer, all on different tech stacks. I am pretty late in career now, 12-15 years in. What do you recommend, in terms of going forward, do I have a chance with trying to be a staff, or should I switch to PM/EM role? I would eventually want to be a good EM.

Which choice is better for long term career growth in FAANG, especially senior to staff?

1. A team of extremely talented engineers (where showing an impact would be very hard)
2. A team of decent talent (but hardworking) where it might be easy to stand out

I know the way I’ve framed the question makes it more like option 2 is better; but, I would love for hear your thoughts.

Hello

TLDR: I started a new job in September last year, and within three months, I was placed on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) with impossible tasks to be completed within four weeks, essentially setting me up for dismissal. Two months prior, I had been seeing a doctor for health issues, and they advised that the PIP would likely worsen my condition. The doctor recommended taking Short Term Disability leave to focus on my health. The tasks I was assigned for the PIP were eventually completed by two engineers (1 staff and 1 Sr) over four months. My Short Term Disability leave ends soon, and I'm unsure whether to return to my old job.

Question for this community:

1. Is it a good idea to return to the same job after being put on a PIP and taking medical leave? (HR informed me that the old PIP would not be in effect upon my return from Short Term Disability leave. However, I'm unclear on how this process works).
2. I want to change teams upon my return; is this something I can negotiate with HR before trying to go back?
3. I like the company and its culture but ended up in the wrong team with the wrong manager. Is there a way I can remain employed at this company but join a different team and manager?

More Context: My manager was present during the hiring interview, where I clearly expressed my desire to move away from a particular tech stack. I was highly rated in the interview and received a generous offer, which I accepted. However, once hired, the manager assigned me to a project in the same area I wanted to avoid. Given it was a high-priority project and my first assignment, I reluctantly accepted. 1 month into the job, I faced a personal emergency requiring a few days off. I shared the reason with my manager, who seemed understanding at first. After that, the manager's behavior changed drastically. They began assigning more work, constantly switching me between multiple issues and projects, and bullying me in meetings. Despite working overtime (12-14 hours/day) to meet expectations, their attitude worsened. This was the worst manager I've encountered in my 14-year career who had unreasonable expectations as far as ramping up on the projects is concerned and it almost seems like I was hired to be fired in this situation. Note: This is not at Amazon.

Any other pointers would be appreciated. Please help.

Does working in different area - infra, developer experience, product, backend, frontend over the career period hurt in terms of becoming/staying a staff engineer or manager?

I work on a new product within a larger company. Our new product has grown to 600k ARR organically (without marketing and only a little sales) and now we’re being asked to get to 3 million ARR this year. We’re hoping to get more support from marketing and sales but I’m wondering what more on the product side can we do?

1. As an engineer, how can I break this “revenue” goal down to help figure out the team’s strategy and what we should be building?
2. Are there sub metrics I should be setting sub goals for?
3. How do I estimate how much ARR a feature will get us? (Or is that just a waste of time because they’re just educated guesses?)
4. How do I know if features on our user feedback boards will help get us new customers (and therefore more ARR) vs just making existing customers happier? Our churn has been very low so as nice as it’d be to just build what our existing users want, I want to prioritize new customers to avoid the project being shut down prematurely.

Appreciate any advice on this! This is a big unknown unknown for me so even just giving me some topics/words to research will be very helpful

Background:

Our team inherited a set of products which are full of spaghetti code and bad design. We are currently building a high visibility and high impact project based on the backend of this system.

Although the main project UI goes on-track, some critical backend design flaws will hinder product performance and reliability within a couple of months - maybe close to or right after official product launch, which will turn our whole effort into a joke since we have executives' eyes on it.

My progress this year so far: (besides my roadmap item commitment)

• 1. Identified a system hotspot, finished analysis & design, and convinced our EM to rewrite this module (currently 95% finished by a junior engineer.)
• 2. Rewrote 1 foundation module to eliminate legacy design flaw (ended up with less code, less complexity, same performance, more system reliability.)
• 3. Design and rewrite another foundation backend module to address legacy design flaw & unblock development of the next milestone
• 4. Leading on technical design and discussion of a re-architecture for the overall backend end to end flow. (simplify design, improve performance)

NOTE:
- I tried to delegate 2 & 3, but no other engineers can do them after a few try since it's too tightly coupled with the rest of the system.
- our team lead is championing for all these work, which is how we are able to make room for them

Benefit of these work:

• accelerate other engineers' work in the system
• cut clean with the legacy system design flaw, improve product reliability and performance
• ensure our team's win on the high visibility project that built on top of this backend
• easier oncall for the short run or long run

My questions:

• In terms of performance review, my manager thinks this is better engineering work, while I think is closely tied to the success of our main project. What kind of evidence do I need to convince him? (My EM is not very technical)
• From his tone, I sense he thinks better engineering work in considered "lower priority contribution". Is this true? How do I communicate the importance of code/design quality with him?
• I'm trying to reach the staff level promo, does this initiative demonstrate any trait for the next level? (I'm not doing it for promo, but my EM's neglect on this makes me pretty frustrated because refactoring and rewrite is such tedious and painful work... I want to make it count)

Thank you!

Hello folks,
I have an upcoming Staff ML Eng. interview with Meta. Could someone please suggest some good resources for behavioral preparation? I have finished the join taro course.

How to build your reputation in new area?

How to use better story telling?

How to better align on the organizational goals?

Since the engineer implementing the task went in a different direction from what I had in mind, now I feel like I have to dive into the code and explain the approaches I wrote, and also get involved in the code much more than I would like. How can I overcome this?

I have about 10 years of experience and currently working as a Staff Engineer. Have worked only in small startup companies.

I consistently get above expectations in appraisals as I always display ownership and have been open to pick new skills and have understanding of the product.

Now coming to the issue, I get stuck with DSA questions and somehow not able to come up with intuitions and don't have the practice to solve any algorithmic problem in 40 minutes.

I seemed to have survived in tech with basic curiosity and common sense till this point LOL!

What about me the best way to pick the skills to crack interviews at big tech spending time to cover topics of DSA, LLD, system design and other rounds?