How do I figure out scope for things to work on as a senior software engineer?

Question

I'm currently a senior software engineer on a backend product platform team in big tech, and for the upcoming quarter I've been told to figure out how to expand scope for platform initiatives given some upcoming product work.

I'm not quite sure how to approach this, other than simply having meetings with other engineers, writing down a bunch of stuff and coming up with a proposal.

This seems very unstructured, and ambiguous to me. And there's not really a team that I'm working with to figure this out.

I'm just a sole engineer talking to partner teams which don't have my project/goals in mind. This happened last quarter as well, where I was the sole engineer working on a project to deliver. Probably this time up I might have an SDE1 or SDE2 to help me out.

Is this normal? Is this helping me grow to become a staff engineer?

Alex Chiou · Accepted Answer

This is actually very normal - I know it feels very ambiguous and you're just sort of floating in this weird void with no clear success criteria, but that's the entire point of a true Staff Engineer project. The expectation of a Staff Engineer (at least at Big Tech) is to own the overall goal, and with just that, create concrete projects to advance the org towards that.

The first part of this process is need-finding, which is what you're currently doing. Platform / infra teams have to do this all the time - You are effectively a user researcher. Talk to a ton of people, figure out their pain points, and see if there's any overlap between their pain points and the solutions/systems your team owns. Here's a thread with some examples: "How can I come up with big initiatives, especially those at a Staff level?"

I recommend the overall senior to staff course as well: Grow From Senior To Staff Engineer: L5 To L6

How do I figure out scope for things to work on as a senior software engineer?

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