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

How A Senior Staff Engineer Can Grow Their Career

Senior Staff Engineers have influence across multiple teams and orgs. They are critical contributors to the direction of their organization, participating in strategic planning, budgeting, and resource allocation.

Negotiating an offer for a Staff role at a Series B -- the recruiter said they were making an offer but only gave me a range

Principal Software Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Principal Software Engineer at Taro Community

Hello! I'm in the final stages of my interview process at a few companies. I heard two days ago that I'd be getting an offer from a public company and just today a Series B company said they were going to extend an offer. (I have 30 minute chat with a Series A CEO tomorrow and an offer seems likely) The Series B company today gave me their comp range for Staff, but did not make a specific offer. The recruiter asked me to come up with what I wanted my comp to be now that I know the band for Staff. It felt odd not getting a specific number.. but I suppose I can consider for the purpose of negotiation that they are offering the top of the range and I can negotiate from there? The recruiter did say I was their best interview (!) so I feel like I have a fair bit of leverage here to potentially get an offer well above the stated band.

This is a bit further complicated however by the fact that I disagree with the methodology the recruiter used to value their options & tokens. I.e. if I agreed with their valuation the TC at the top of their range is what I am targeting, but according to my calculations the TC at the top of the range is 35% too low. So I'd probably need them to double the equity/token package to make this worthwhile. The top of the range for base is also below my base target, but not that dramatically. . . more like 5%.

Am I better off asking for a Sr Staff leveling or just ask for comp that's above the band for the Staff title? I imagine bands are more strict at public companies than they are at a Series B.

Finally, I'm wondering what people think about adding acceleration & severance upon termination w/o cause as a negotiation lever. Given the volatility of the cryptocurrency market I am concerned about job security in this role, so some security that would be provided by an acceleration upon termination clause in my contract would help me swallow the somewhat low base & illiquid equity that they are offering. Do Series B companies ever provide that to non-VP/C-level hires?

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Posted 4 months ago
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How can I work better with toxic staff engineers and bring this to my manager's attention?

Anonymous User at Taro Community profile pic
Anonymous User at Taro Community

Hey,

I am 8 months in, and there are only two staff engineers on the team.They are pretty demeaning (I find it almost racial, and sexist) and always try and create a bad perspective of me to management. My manager had no clue what I was working on, and she asked me if I consider myself a senior engineer? (I have been a senior for half my career) Only after I was removed from that toxic person's project, I grew and management trusts me now.

I am not a newbie, I have 11 years of work ex and previously worked at a FAANG, where I got exceptional reviews. I am now in a tier 2 company now, and literally anything I suggest to them is po-pooed.

Something as simple as a suggestion to maintain a on-call log as we are ramping up on releasing a new feature, was vetoed against by these two. Our on-call is dumpster fire, with no one knows what is going on expect these two.

Since these two know the technology well, they can get away with any behavior as managers is under pressure and just want this damn feature to launch. Our team is filled with junior engineers and contractors barring a few Senior engineers and these two.

Every task while planning for JIRA starts with "oh this is verrrryyy easy". But it turns out they don't know sh*t and their estimates and providing context is setting me up for failure. I quickly got hang of it, and figured out how to reach my target in-spite of their mis-doings.

They are rude, degrading (only towards me, I find) and are each other's allies. How do I bring it up to a manager without complaining or sounding emotional (I am a women, so its easy to say, I am overreacting by these two, I DO NOT trust them).

I don't want to run away, but stay strong and prove to them and management my caliber. But this also makes it harder to grow on this team.

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Posted a year ago
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