Grow From Senior To Staff Engineer: L5 To L6
The Staff Engineer promotion can feel impossible: it requires a level of initiative and ownership that engineers rarely demonstrate. However, the reward is immense: Staff Engineers are clear leaders in their org, often commanding $500K+ in total compensation (TC).
This course is about breaking beyond the senior level as an individual contributor. We'll cover frameworks and tactics to optimize your promotion to Staff Engineer.
The most common reasons for a failed Staff Engineer promotion are:
- "You don't have enough scope"
- "You're not working strategically enough"
- "You need to drive problems with more technical complexity"
It's easy to hear this and feel stuck. How can I translate this into action?
The promotion beyond Senior Engineer (generally called Staff or Principal Engineer) is not about working faster or longer -- it's about behavior change that enables you to tackle more difficult problems.
By the end of the course, you will:
- 💡 Truly understand the difference between a senior engineer and a staff engineer (more than a career matrix)
- 🧠 Create clear mental models to develop L6 behavior
- 📃 Identify your fundamental gaps to staff
- 🗺️ Chart a path to Staff Engineer
- 🧐 Go through Staff Engineer archetypes to find your fit
Who is this course for?
- You're a senior engineer in Big Tech looking to get promoted, but struggling to find scope and influence. e.g. Google L5, Amazon SDE 3
- You're an engineering manager or director and want to provide concrete guidance for your engineers to achieve career growth.
- You're an engineer who wants to validate your career direction by learning how very senior engineers are evaluated at larger companies.
Across my 4.5 years working at Meta, I experienced the frustration of failing and then finally achieving the Staff Eng (E6) promotion. This course distills years of my own career experience as an IC, transitioning to management, and talking to 500+ engineers directly to observe patterns that hold engineers back at this critical inflection point.
I documented his entire journey at Meta, including every performance rating and compensation change, in this viral video: What It Took To Become An $800,000 Engineer
Distilling patterns from 100s of engineers
Before the creation of this on-demand course, I taught a live, cohort-based version of this course. This course was taken by 100+ engineers across several sessions, and I was able to receive amazing feedback on what works (and what doesn't) when it comes to the promotion beyond Senior.
I was able to incorporate nuances and ideas from many more engineers at managers, going far beyond my experience at Meta. This on-demand course is the distillation of hundreds of 1:1 conversations and students from live cohort multiple times.
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