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

I improved a complex library integration in our app, which reduced our amount of crashes and memory leaks by X amount. I can pull some concrete numbers from the Play Console and Firebase dashboards to back this up.

However, I'm wondering if the overall business even cares about these memory leaks and crashes. For context, the feature worked fine overall prior, evidenced by the fact that there were no real user complaints about it.

Under what circumstances is a candidate typically down-leveled after the onsite interviews at Meta? The interview was for an E5 SWE role. The recruiter mentioned that the coding interview was not at E5 level (this was even after acing both the medium level coding questions with the correct Time & Space complexities). I am looking for guidance on what could be the reason here. Also, the feedback for the System Design and Behavioral rounds were good. Thanks in advance!

What would be the next roles/avenues to look for, after being staff engineer for a couple of years?

Does moving to a managerial role become easy after being a staff for a while, in terms of lateral/vertical hire and also managing the role once hired?

Our office in Bellevue, WA has a beer pub next to it, is it common for people to get team building starting after work with a pizza or a draft IPA in company like Meta?

Hi Taro community,

I have gone through the in-depth explainers on Side projects and totally understand the importance of having good side projects on your resume. However, I have been working in the cloud-infra space in my recent company (Tech stack is heavily based on Python, SQL, JS and ElasticSearch) and was wondering how I could explain impact of any side projects in this space (like for apps we have downloads, for websites we have how many times visited, no. of signups, etc.), what kind of side projects could I target in the cloud infra space that can have some quantifiable impact as well?

Curious to hear about what archetypes you think AI teams follow.

For ex: I think Specialist, Tech Leads are pretty common for AI teams. But we probably have a few archetypes like fixer that are slightly different in the skillset (dig through data, analyze common usecases).

Did meta have any additional archetypes for AI eng types?

Finding a mentor requires effort and patience. It’s about building relationships based on trust, respect, and mutual benefit. By actively seeking out mentors and demonstrating your commitment to growth, you can gain invaluable guidance and support as you navigate your career path.

How to find the best people who would like to be mentored and people who are mentors?

I'm senior level MLE but I have getting a lot recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn for staff level engineering but I don't feel like I have what it takes to succeed at that role. I'm not sure if there is guidelines or training program to prepare for this type of role?

How much of ML experience is needed/looked at during Team Match, if particulary interested in joining a team doing ML? Are Hiring Managers particular about this requirement during TM? This is for a E5 and E4 levels.

I'm originally from India. I started working in the US from 2021. My team in the Bay Area is pretty talented and I have been learning a lot from them. I am considering if I should move back to India at some point down the line. I'm worried about the career opportunities in India though.

Given most companies have their headquarters here, Bay Area has plenty of L5, L6, L7 engineers tackling massive scope. Does India also have many Staff+ engineering roles dealing with massive projects? Or are the opportunities in India mostly restricted to L3-L5 levels?

I've been interviewing. I interviewed well with one company, and the company was ready to give me an offer. I told them I was in various stages of interviewing with other companies and would like to decide by 11/26. The recruiter asked me how I would decide. I named some criteria regarding developer tooling/mentoring/on-call. And I also mentioned I would compare numbers if I had other offers. The recruiter also mentioned they would like me to decide so that they know whether to move forward with other candidates in the pipeline, and she would talk with the hiring manager to see if they needed to move faster. She scheduled an additional call with a principal engineer on the topic of dealing with tech debt on Thursday but never got back to me about what the hiring manager said.

This company is high on my list except for possibly one other company I am wrapping up interviews with tomorrow, though I have another company with interviews on Monday. If I pass those interviews, they may want another interview to decide the level to offer me (between Senior and Staff).

How would you advise me to respond?

I know this is a broad question and depends on personal choices. I'm wondering if you could provide some insights on choosing between IC and manager paths.
What are the factors to look into?
How fast or difficult is career growth in both the paths?
How do the work-life balance and day-to-day life look like in both these paths?
My eventual goal is to start a startup. Does having managerial experience help here or being strong senior/staff IC help here better?

I am primarily working on Python. Would like to know how common Go is in the web space.

And what are some resources for getting into web development using Go and how to performance tune and get a deep dive on the internals of the server?

My team spends a good amount of time fixing random/recurring low priority crashes. The goal is to keep the overall crash rate under our agreed SLA. Crash rate naturally goes up over time, so we need to continually invest time plugging up these crashes to keep the overall metric below SLA.

Is there a way to quantify this in numbers. Maybe we can draw the connection between these fixes and a better user experience that ultimately affects the app users' ratings in the Play Store?

Hello! I recently received an offer letter for a senior software engineer role. It seems pretty good. When asked for a range, I gave $215 to 305k. They came back with somewhere around the midpoint. Also, the equity is very generous for a Series A startup... it seems like a good faith offer.

I'm expecting two other offers next week and have a work trial in another interview pipeline for a director-level role. Should I attempt to negotiate a signing bonus to take the offer without waiting for my other options to come through?

In your experience, what methods worked best to motivate engineers that don't report to you or work on a daily basis?

As a Staff engineer, I need to advocate and motivate engineers in my span to adopt new tools or processes. The main challenge is around building rapport with the remote team that are mostly new hires or I didn't interact a whole lot earlier.

While this questions, majorly sounds how to influence without authority. I am looking for more concrete steps for a quick win while I work on the culture part as a whole.