Beyond Staff Engineer

The Timeless Essence of Software Engineering

This is the Season Finale. Aimed at Staff+ and Principal engineers — but written with the awareness that growth never ends.

Though higher levels exist, I believe anything beyond ultimately returns to the enduring principles of engineering and leadership.

Read season 1 and season 2:

Becoming a Production-Ready Engineer

Leveling Up to Staff Engineer

Software career progression doesn’t stop at “Staff Engineer” – nor at “Principal Engineer.” In a typical dual-track career ladder, after Senior Engineer comes Staff, then Principal, and even Distinguished Engineer at the pinnacle. Some organizations add intermediate steps (e.g. Senior Principal) before the top, and the most advanced engineers often influence not just their company but the wider industry. In practice, very few reach those upper echelons, but that’s exactly the point: there is no “final level”. The technical leadership path is open-ended, emphasizing continual growth in impact and responsibility rather than chasing a title. By the time you’re operating at Staff-plus levels, it becomes clear that career development is a journey of continuous learning and expansion, not a destination. Each level is a waypoint, not an endpoint. Your focus shifts from “How do I get promoted?” to “How can I keep growing and contributing meaningfully?” – a question that remains relevant no matter how senior you become.

This closing chapter addresses those at Staff+ and Principal levels (and those aspiring to be). It looks beyond the titles to the qualities and mindset that define enduring success in software engineering. At these senior technical ranks, you’ve mastered a depth of expertise and developed breadth across many domains. Now the challenge is to architect across and beyond – to leverage your depth and breadth in service of something larger than yourself.

Each step up the ladder represents broader impact and scope – but even the highest rung isn’t “the end,” just a new vantage point for further growth.

From Technical Expert to Strategic Technical Leader

By the time you reach Staff or Principal Engineer, your role is no longer just about writing code – it’s about technical leadership. As Principal Engineer Joy Ebertz put it, “The more senior you get, the less your job is about code… through principal, you’ll likely be doing at least some coding. However, the higher you get, the more your job becomes about mentoring and growing the people around you, building your team’s public tech brand, noticing larger technical trends to improve, setting the tech vision for your team or company, and advocating for resourcing of tech debt projects.” In other words, your scope of influence widens dramatically. You still use your technical skills, but now coding is just one tool among many – and often not the primary one.

At this stage, you continue many activities that made you a successful Senior engineer – writing software, reviewing code, solving complex problems – but their significance shifts. What used to be your core work becomes the context for higher-level contributions. A Staff-plus engineer’s foundation typically includes “setting and editing technical direction, providing sponsorship and mentorship, injecting engineering context into organizational decisions, and what Tanya Reilly calls ‘being glue’”. You are expected to lead projects with strategic value for the company, drive architectural decisions, and uplift your team’s capabilities, all while still collaborating and coding at a high level. In effect, you evolve from a solo problem-solver into a technical strategist and multiplier.

Crucially, your value is measured less by the problems you solve personally and more by the problems you enable the organization to solve. That means cultivating skills beyond the purely technical. Communication, influence, and big-picture thinking become part of your daily job. In many companies, a common dysfunction is to view very senior ICs as simply “advanced problem solvers” to be handed the hardest tasks, instead of as strategic contributors with a seat at the decision-making table. Avoid this trap. As a Staff+ engineer, you should be actively participating in high-level planning and decisions, not just parachuted in for emergencies. In fact, with your experience, you can contribute significantly to defining business objectives and technology strategy – bridging the gap between technology and business. Use that position to prevent issues, not just fix them after the fact. If technical leaders are excluded from early strategic decisions, the organization risks serious blind spots. Part of your responsibility is to earn and assert influence so that your voice is heard before directions are set in stone.

To succeed as a technical leader, you must also invest in so-called “soft” skills – which are often the hard skills in practice. This includes communication tailored to non-engineers, negotiation, and mentorship. It may feel like a different job than coding all day, and in many ways it is. The technical track and management track converge in skillset the further you go. A Staff Engineer and an Engineering Manager might both be thinking about team direction, resolving cross-team conflicts, and long-term roadmaps – just through different authority vectors. Unlike managers, Staff+ engineers lack formal org chart power, so you must influence without authority. That requires trust and respect, which you build through a track record of good technical judgment, reliability, and helping others succeed. You earn the reputation as a trusted advisor so that when you speak, people listen.

In practical terms, here are some strategic shifts as you move into Staff+ leadership:

1. Expand Your Perspective: Stop thinking only about your code or your team’s code. Start thinking in terms of systems and business impact. For example, Staff engineers often operate as the voice of technology in conversations with product and business leaders – “speaking for the company’s technology” and ensuring it’s represented in decisions. You advocate for long-term technical health and scalability, even when others focus on short-term features. This might feel less tangible than writing features, but it’s critical work. As a senior technical leader, you focus on progress over the long term rather than viewing each decision as a make-or-break crisis. That means being pragmatic and patient, guiding steady improvement of architecture and codebase health instead of chasing every shiny new tool.

2. Influence Technical Direction: You are responsible for setting or vetting the technical roadmap. Often you’ll help define a technical vision for an area and get people aligned towards it. Many teams have an instinct that things “could be better” but no clear picture of what better looks like. Step into that void and facilitate a shared vision – a target state architecture or improvement plan that everyone can work toward. “I like to help the group decide on a shared understanding of where exactly they’re trying to get (it’s okay if we never fully get there) and a general game plan of how to get there,” one Staff engineer explains. You rally and coordinate efforts so that engineering work isn’t just a series of disconnected tasks, but part of a cohesive strategy. Importantly, setting technical direction at this level is not about pushing your personal favorite technologies. In fact, a constant in Staff+ roles is that success comes from meeting the real needs of the organization, not indulging one’s own technical preferences. As Will Larson notes, in earlier career stages you might advocate for tech you’re excited about, but at the Staff/Principal level “you’re accountable to the business and organization first and yourself second.” Keeping the company’s goals front-and-center is key to making wise technical decisions.

3. Mentor and Multiply: As your scope increases, so does your leverage through others. You are now a force multiplier for your team and beyond. This means heavy involvement in mentoring less experienced engineers, spreading knowledge, and raising the overall technical bar. It’s been said that “you’re far more likely to change your company’s long-term trajectory by growing the engineers around you than through personal heroics.” Take that to heart. The mythos of the lone genius is overrated (and often a PR creation) – real, sustained impact comes from empowering many others. Make mentorship and sponsorship of others a deliberate practice, not a checkbox. Share your hard-won knowledge, give advice, and also sponsor engineers by opening opportunities for them, recommending them for key projects, and advocating for their advancement. The best senior engineers put “their thumb on the scale” to actively elevate those around them. By multiplying the capabilities of many, you amplify your impact across the organization.

4. Be the Example: Whether you like it or not, at Staff+ level you are a role model in your organization. Your peers and junior engineers will take cues from your behavior. “People will assume you know what you’re talking about – so you’d better know what you’re talking about!” as one Staff Engineer quipped. In practice, others will watch how you handle challenges, how you treat colleagues, how you balance quality and deadlines, and they will emulate it. “How you behave is how others will behave… You’ll be the voice of reason, the ‘adult in the room’”. If you cut corners or lose your cool, don’t be surprised when the team normalizes that. If you demonstrate calm professionalism and thoughtful decision-making, others will follow suit. Remember that engineering isn’t just about how you interact with computers – it’s also about how you interact with humans. Often being a good engineer boils down to being a good teammate. At the Staff/Principal level, you are setting the culture. For example, if the company preaches collaboration but the only people who get promoted are lone wolves doing “heroic” all-nighters, guess what behaviors people will mimic? Senior technical leaders must model the values they want to see: cooperation, accountability, fairness, inclusivity. This “passive influence” of leading by example has enormous effect.

In short, crossing into Staff+ means evolving from a doer of tasks to an enabler, architect, and mentor. You leverage your expertise to guide broader efforts. You move from owning one piece of the puzzle to owning the picture on the puzzle box – ensuring all the pieces fit together and align with the bigger goals. It’s a shift from being the player on the field to also being the coach and strategist. Embrace that expanded role fully.

Architecting Across Systems and Beyond Boundaries

At Staff and Principal levels, you are expected to think and act on a higher plane of abstraction. Instead of focusing only on one component or project, you look at systems holistically and architect across teams and domains. A Principal Engineer is often described as the technical authority for a broad area, responsible for designing complex solutions and mentoring teams, with a mandate to shape the technical direction of projects and even the organization. In practical terms, this involves working on problems that no single team can tackle alone – the “glue” work and connective architecture that makes multiple systems or groups function in harmony.

One way to view a Principal Engineer’s job is as a connector and catalyst across the engineering organization. Ilya Grigorik describes the Principal role as often operating in the gaps and friction points between teams: “Teams optimize for their local needs; your job is to guide the organization towards better global outcomes. All decisions at this level require tradeoffs across teams, execution speed, and business priorities. Your scope spans teams, and your leverage is as a process facilitator and trusted guide through this foggy landscape.” In other words, you ensure that what each team is doing fits into a coherent whole – that optimization for one group doesn’t wreck another’s plans, and that technical decisions account for company-wide impacts. You live at the boundaries: between teams, between product and engineering, between present needs and future possibilities. By bridging these gaps, you architect solutions that serve the greater good of the organization, not just one silo.

Key aspects of “architecting across and beyond” include:

• Seeing the Big Picture: Develop a mental model of the entire system (or a significant subsection of it) – how components interconnect, where the pain points and inefficiencies lie, and how data and control flow through it. Principal engineers often can “visualize and share the current architecture and infrastructure… (hardware, software, cloud, database, network…)” for the whole platform. Cultivate this systems thinking. It enables you to spot systemic problems (scalability chokepoints, duplicative efforts, mismatched technologies) and propose unified solutions. Rather than narrowing your focus, you widen it – sometimes to company-wide scope. This might mean doing design reviews across teams, aligning API designs, or creating frameworks that multiple teams will use. You may not be the hands-on expert in each piece, but you know enough to connect the dots and ask the right questions.

• Cross-Team Collaboration: As a senior architect, you routinely collaborate across organizational boundaries. You might convene staff engineering forums or architecture councils to discuss issues that span teams. You work with other departments – product management, design, DevOps, etc. – to ensure technical solutions meet business needs and vice versa. Often you will be “pulled into the room” for critical discussions or crises that affect multiple teams. This is your time to shine by injecting engineering perspective into decisions that others might try to make in a vacuum. Remember, when you’re at that table, you’re not just speaking for yourself – you’re representing all of engineering. That means voicing concerns about technical debt, operational risk, or scalability early, and offering options or trade-offs in language stakeholders understand. By being an effective translator between technology and business, you help prevent costly mistakes and ensure engineering considerations are included from the start.

• Facilitating, Not Dictating: A common misconception is that a Principal Engineer is an all-knowing technical “boss” who single-handedly makes all big decisions. In reality, effective Staff+ engineers act more like facilitators and influencers than dictators. You will often find yourself as the most senior person in the room, yet not necessarily the deepest expert on the specific topic at hand. And that’s okay. Your job is not to provide all the answers, but to ask insightful questions, surface different viewpoints, and guide the group toward a decision that considers all angles. Think of yourself as an impartial arbiter or a coach for technical decision-making. “It’s not your job to solve the problem [alone]. Your job is to partner with tech leads and experts… chances are you’re in the room because there are trade-offs or decisions that span beyond the immediate team. Serve as an objective guide on the journey. The team should own the outcome and execution; your responsibility is to improve the quality and outcome of the decision process.” In practice, that means listening actively to the engineers closest to the problem, contributing your broad perspective (e.g. “Have we considered how this scales in a year?” or “How will this integrate with System X?”), and helping the team weigh options. You intervene if the team is veering off-track or missing a crucial consideration, but you avoid dictating unless absolutely necessary. People support what they help create – so you want teams to feel ownership of decisions, with you as a guiding hand, not a micromanaging superior. This facilitative approach also builds trust: teams know you’re there to support, not to steal the wheel.

• Global Optimization: Because your scope spans multiple domains, you often need to resolve conflicts and find solutions that benefit the organization as a whole. Individual teams naturally optimize for their own deliverables and timelines. You have to recognize when local optimizations are clashing with each other or when a short-term win for one team might cause long-term pain for others. As a senior architect, you promote designs and approaches that maximize global value – even if that means persuading one team to adjust their plan for the greater good. For example, you might guide two teams to adopt a common platform or protocol instead of building duplicative ones, or decide to invest in foundational infrastructure that doesn’t immediately deliver a feature but pays off across many projects. All such decisions involve trade-offs (features vs. tech debt vs. speed vs. cost), and you’re instrumental in balancing them. You operate with a system-wide mindset: seeing how everything connects and where to push for alignment.

• Hands-On Technical Credibility: While a huge portion of Staff/Principal work is communication and planning, it’s important to stay sufficiently hands-on to maintain credibility and insight. You don’t necessarily code full-time on critical path projects, but you should keep your technical intuition and skills sharp. Many Staff engineers ensure they do at least some coding or technical prototyping on the side, partly to inform their strategic decisions with on-the-ground experience. Choose a sliver of the system where you can get your hands dirty occasionally – it helps you stay relevant and also earns respect from the team (they see you aren’t completely detached from implementation realities). Technical leadership carries weight when it’s backed by genuine understanding. That said, beware of spending too much time in the comfort zone of coding and not enough on the harder leadership tasks. As the staffeng.com guide notes, if you find yourself coding too much at this level, it may be a sign you’re gravitating to familiar work instead of tackling the important but less tangible problems. Use coding strategically: to investigate new approaches, verify assumptions, or solve critical problems that unblock others – not as an escape from meetings. You are an architect-engineer hybrid now, not a pure builder.

In summary, architecting across and beyond means you are responsible for the forest, not just the trees. You think in terms of systems, platforms, and organizational capabilities. You break down silos, ensure coherence, and create architectures that stand the test of time and scale. Your horizon is broad: multiple teams, multiple years into the future, multiple layers of the stack. This is challenging, but it’s the natural evolution of a technical career once you’ve achieved mastery of individual components. Embrace the role of the architect and navigator guiding your engineering org through complexity.

The Timeless Essence of Software Engineering

As we conclude this “season” of your career journey, it’s worth stepping back from the day-to-day and reflecting on the timeless principles that underpin great software engineering, especially as one reaches Staff+ levels. Titles and technologies will come and go, but certain core tenets remain constant throughout a distinguished career. Focusing on these will not only make you effective in your current role, but will sustain your growth for decades to come, regardless of trends or title changes.