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

Hi everyone,

A few years ago, I moved back to India from the UK for personal and family reasons, although I always appreciated the quality of life there.

Currently, I’m working at a US-based big tech company in India as a Tech Lead/Staff Engineer and the salary is top notch and in parity with Google/Microsoft for similar roles. While I’ve been a top performer, I’m struggling to settle down here, especially now that I have kids. I believe the UK offers them a better education and overall quality of life. However, despite strong referrals, I’ve been surprised by how difficult it’s been to get my profile noticed for new opportunities in the UK.

Recently, I received an offer from one of my previous employers. The work-life balance is appealing, but the salary is about the same as what I’m earning in India. Factoring in stock and other benefits, it’s actually less. Additionally, the offer involves a down-leveling, which I’m not too concerned about. Given the UK’s cost of living is at least three times higher than India’s, this is a tough decision.

After speaking with my current manager, I’ve managed to secure a fully remote role, which would significantly lower my living costs by about half. Plus, we’re also working on my promotion to Principal Engineer.

I’m wondering if I’m rushing to return to the UK. Should I hold out for a better opportunity?

PS: Financially I don't have a lot of savings until now.

Thanks,

Thanks a lot for the wonderful promotion courses, Rahul and Alex.

Getting promoted to an L6 role seems like it requires us to build a lot of skills and behaviors. What are some of the skills or behaviors that you observed that take a very long time to master in the journey of getting promoted to L6 and beyond? It would help to be deliberate and focus on mastering these skills/behaviors early in the career to get the promotions faster.

Just went through Rahul's amazing . Excited to learn the different staff engineer archetypes that exist.

I'm curious what your Staff Engineer archetype is. At what point in your career (and how) did you start identifying your archetype, and strengthening it? Once a staff engineer falls into an archetype, do they generally change over time, or do they fix on their archetype for the rest of their life?

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 see some senior engineers getting promoted to staff within 2 years. Whereas other senior engineers take 5-7+ years.

What are some hurdles that senior engineers face when getting promoted to staff engineer? How to watch out for and avoid these hurdles to get promoted within 2 years?

What’s the biggest skill to start mastering or how to set yourself up for success at an early stage to make this promotion faster?

Is it easier to get this promotion in big tech or a startup?

Does changing teams or orgs or companies delay this promotion? 

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 have a follow-up coding interview with Meta after the Onsite rounds. Under what circumstances is a follow-up round requested? Is it because there were some strong hire rounds and some weak hire rounds? I am looking to gather inputs/tips on how I should be preparing for this interview. Would this interview be different from the other coding interviews that have already been completed?

I am thinking about finding a position at another company. But I am concerned about how to find something suitable. I am considering moving because I would like to work and learn at a company that practices better code quality: better separations of concerns, better testing. I've learned recently that code quality corresponds closely not only to speed of development, developer happiness, but, also stress. I don't know though how I would know about code quality from the interview process. I can imagine maybe asking multiple engineers from the company what they think during the interview process. Maybe ask engineers that I've worked with before from the company. Also, some companies may be reputable like Google. Or maybe some famous engineers work there like ThoughtWorks.

I am currently a Staff Engineer at a company, and I've worked for almost 6 years there. I've also been promoted at the company. I think there are factors that are important for me that keep me there. A flexible vacation policy that is actually flexible as I've usually taken about 5 weeks off a year, commitment to remote work, flexibility to set time off during workdays. On the other hand, even though I am one of the top committers to our code repository, I am not sure if I am getting credit for that here.

One thing that worked really well was that I started at this company when engineering was around 30-40 people. That meant work time was stable unlike an early startup, but the company was at an early enough stage that I really got to know a large portion of the code base, over multiple functional areas, before the code base kept growing and new teams were formed.

Regarding programming language / framework, I would prefer Scala. I also would like to learn ZIO. But I think that's secondary to the factor regarding code quality.

Could you give me advice as to how to search for jobs given the different factors that I've listed?

I completed my final rounds at Meta. I heard back from the recruiter on the same day pretty quickly that they would like to set up a call and asked for Meta references. Is this a good sign? How important are the references?

Hello folks,
I have an upcoming Staff ML Eng. interview with Meta. Could someone please suggest some good resources for behavioral preparation? I have finished the join taro course.

I’ll be starting as an E6 at Meta, working on internal tools. Currently, the headcount is really low, and people only have 60 days to match, so I decided to go with the first team I matched with, even though it’s not the most exciting option.

I’m committed to doing a great job in this role, but I’m a bit concerned about the potential impact I can have and how that might affect my performance reviews (or get me PIPd). Is this something I should be worried about? Any advice on how I can maximize my impact on a team that might not be seen as highly impactful?

I have been with my current team (a platform team) for about almost 3 years now, and I believe I have build good relationships with others in the org. I am thinking about projects that can get me to E6.

So far, the projects that I come up with, feels underwhelming after talking to more senior IC. The IC either think there the ROI is not high enough, or the project is too much of BE. For other ideas, it feels like that I would have scope collision with other ICs. I sometimes feels too tired to churn through more ideas. I am not sure if this is normal, or if I would be able to succeed in my current team to get to E6. How would you decide it is time to change teams?

I just watched . Great material! In a couple of session, it was mentioned that Infra teams works differently, e.g. there is not as much XFN. Can you shed some light on how Infra team promo works?

Hi All

Some companies have a project deep dive interviews as part of the hiring loop interviews and I was looking for any good resources about how to structure and be well prepared for these interviews. Appreciate any pointers.

Note: I have seen this predominantly for Staff+ positions.

Thanks

Rahul

Put on an exciting Staff level project for the last 6 months. Now, asked to make a tough choice - move out of Org or stay in current Org and give up scope.

Pros of moving:

• Scope: getting multiple jr level engineers to carry out the scope I created.
• Exciting product.

Cons of moving:

• Current manager turned down the scope expansion.
• Have built relationships within current team. Enjoy working with them (more familiar)
• Less depth AI/ML work but more product heavy (which is high impact as well but slightly less interesting from ML standpoint)
• Lots of unknowns with new team - unknowns beyond staff scope IMO

TLDR; What would others in the same situation recommend? From taro courses, Option 1 seems better. But there are unknowns especially with current manager refusing the offer.

Recruiters often mention that a staff engineer interview involves a deeper dive compared to a senior software engineer interview, but it's not clear how much deeper it needs to go. Are there any resources that can clarify this?

Hi

I am thinking that if I also start to show the basics of a staff engineer, it might be helpful to reach a senior engineer status.

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?