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

Having spent over a decade in tech and experienced both sides of the equation, here are my observations: With the recent shift in the tech industry, many companies, including my own, are moving a large portion of their workforce to India, seemingly due to cost considerations. However, after working with a US-based team for nearly a year, I can confidently say this arrangement often comes at the expense of work-life balance (WLB) and harmony. The significant time zone difference results in minimal overlap, and flexibility from the US side is generally limited. Few team members are available past 10 PM their time, yet many meetings and office hours fall between 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM IST. While recordings are available, they lack the interactivity needed for effective participation. For senior engineers like myself, the challenges are amplified. During the day, I manage my India-based team, and it falls on me to sync with the US team during early mornings or late nights. This schedule leaves little room for balance. I've observed that many colleagues appear overworked, with a noticeable number being online well past 10 PM regularly. This setup often feels unsustainable, especially for those who value a healthy work-life balance.

As you climb up the career ladder (senior -> staff), this soft skill becomes more and more important. What are some ways I can keep honing it? Are there any professional courses I can consider? I would learn to be effective and efficient at it, specially in scenarios such as public speaking, team meetings, project status, emails etc. Also, English is not my first language.

Considering that multiple candidates are under consideration, when speaking to a Hiring Manager during team match at Meta, is there something one can do to maximize their chances of getting picked during the Team Match call? It feels like a lost cause otherwise if you have put in all the effort to clear the interviews, but do not successfully match with a team. Apart from showing the excitement, and being inquisitive during the call, what are some qualities in a candidate that could stand out?

Hey! I am joining a startup as a Staff Engineer. I understand, titles can be inflated at a start up. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get to staff at big tech, without a supportive team. My eventual goal is to be a staff engineer at a FAANG, or a very high achieving Senior at a FAANG. I want to use this startup "Staff" as a way to really hone my skills, learn and grow. Purely focussing on my love for coding, software engineering and learning, and not motivated by money. Keeping the above in mind, how can I ensure, I have staff level scope ( & not just a title) at this startup. And any tips for successful onboarding at a startup helps, from your personal experience.! ( Yes, I went through Rahul's course already :) ) It is a series B start up, with 70 people.

Hello! I recently received an offer letter for a senior software engineer role. It seems pretty good. When asked for a range, I gave $215 to 305k. They came back with somewhere around the midpoint. Also, the equity is very generous for a Series A startup... it seems like a good faith offer.

I'm expecting two other offers next week and have a work trial in another interview pipeline for a director-level role. Should I attempt to negotiate a signing bonus to take the offer without waiting for my other options to come through?

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?

In the past two years, I've been employed at an Indian company in the role of Engineering Manager. However, my experience was marred by a lack of learning opportunities and a restrictive culture that limited my decision-making authority. Despite these challenges, I chose to stay due to personal commitments, particularly with a baby on the way. Recently, I decided to transition to a Staff role at a European startup, embracing remote work and a more supportive culture (I loved this job and role). While the change has been positive, I find myself facing the challenge of underdeveloped skills and falling short of my expectations (It's my feeling). How can I effectively overcome this situation and make the maximum impact in my new role? Specifically, I need to enhance my technological proficiency, deepen my understanding of business dynamics, and integrate seamlessly into the organizational culture. What strategies should I employ to bridge this gap swiftly and justify my position within the company?

I joined Cisco Meraki like a year ago as a Sr. SWE and got promoted to a Technical Leader. I kinda did the role of a Technical Leader as a Sr. SWE like mentoring junior engs, doing lots of code reviews, keeping up the code quality, contributing to org wide projects and such. I learnt all these things from working for Meta as a L5. Now that i got a new "Title", i have a feeling that i should do something more and different - I am not sure if i should feel that way because this is the first time i am at this level in my career. I am wondering what i should do to keep up with the expectations. When i had this convo with my Manager, got some tips but all around, it was the same things what i did before but i got repeateadly said that expectations for a Technical Leader is going to be much higher than a Sr. SWE. I saw a whole bunch of youtube videos and blog post reg Technical Leader role but i kinda know that already, I am sure a bunch of engs already been through this already.

Any advice would be super helpful.

Just got promoted to E5. I'm doing well in my product team and confident I’ll keep performing, but the technical learning is shallow. The work is more about organizing SWEs/XFNs, aligning stakeholders, and wearing multiple hats (PM, design, data eng, etc.). I’m good at this—soft skills have always been my strength. But the technical skills I’m gaining aren’t that "valuable." It’s mostly fullstack work relying on frameworks like React, which any decent developer can do. I feel like I’m missing out by not working on infra, where I could develop harder, more foundational skills (distributed systems, scalability, performance, reliability). These seem more transferable outside of Meta. The problem is, I struggled in infra before (short stint at a prior big tech company), while I’ve thrived in product. Not sure if I’d do well or just flop again—and now’s a bad time to underperform. Maybe I should be leaning on my strengths (soft skills) and accept the fact I don't have much of a technical edge for doing really well in Infra. I’m confident I can hit E6 in product, but will I get stuck there? Would switching to infra give me a better shot at E7+ and better opportunities outside Meta? Am I wrong?

Hi - I am selected as Senior Engineer in Linkedin Marketing Solutions team. I have close to 12 years of experience and masters in US. I want to be prepared as the recruiter is working towards my package. My question is: Generally, Senior Engineer maps to IC3. But, I have confirmed with the recruiter that I am selected for the IC4 role. Does this mean, my comp will be comparable to Staff Engineer? For Ic4 Staff level, Looking at , the comp range is from 380k to 500k. Please guide the fair comp to ask for?

Hi all, I joined Airbnb about 6 months ago and have been told by my manager that I'm doing superbly and that he seems me becoming one of the top people in my org. I don't think he's the type to over-embellish or say things that aren't true so I believe him. Given that, there's already a lot of strong senior and staff engineers in my team and org. How should I approach finding those juicier opportunities to make larger impacts outside of my immediate projects? I'm one of the most productive engineers on my team right now but finding those high-leverage and larger impact projects on my own has always been challenging for me. I'm not an ideas person but I'm a solid executor. Recently, I've been on a really large project that was simply handed to me and one that I'm not leading that's taken up the entire company's time but after this is all over, I'd like to start brainstorming and executing on some of these more unique and high-impact projects that can help me become a Staff engineer. I want to get into a position where I'm driving high-impact projects that ideally I come up with. Would appreciate some advice on how to approach my current situation and work towards this goal. Thanks!

In our operational workflows, business users aim to update rules in a SharePoint-stored spreadsheet. This sheet influences diverse data processing workflows. I'm contemplating to do it on a version-controlled repository like Git.

The dilemma is whether granting users editing freedom enhances usability or if control via Git ensures thorough tracking and review of changes.

How do I delineate between business processes open to user modification and those mandating Git control for optimal balance?

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?

Background

I have nearly 8 years of experience including internships. Last 7-8 years I was working in fast faced companies and Startups. This is my Day 4 at my new company as SSE. Issues: In hiring manager round, he informed me that its not customer facing team but horizontal team which is needed for the company. In intro meeting, when i asked about home office setup, he said that u can take it if needed but anyway there won't be big code to view in monitor. My team is not customer facing team and we won't be using actual data of customers. Its just internal team for internal employees

Current Situation

All engineers are new. We all have similar years of experience We have 1-2 staff engineer for the entire org. Getting married in next 6 weeks. So can't do job shift again immediately.

Question

My expectation before joining here is to become Staff software engineer in next 1 and half years by following everything mentioned in Taro. but looking at current work and team I'm confused about my next steps. How should I approach this situation? What should I do to become staff software engineer here? Should I leave the company? I suspect team shift can be possible at this moment.

I am a Staff Engineer and the Principal Engineer always gives me feedback in meetings. How do I politely ask him to do it in private or offline in chat? The engineer referred me in the company and I think the intent is positive, but I feel threatened and embarrassed all the time. Also my credibility always goes to zero level. Key Points I would like to Keep in Mind: Tone: Keep your tone appreciative and non-confrontational. The goal is to make it a collaborative request rather than a criticism. Timing: Raise this when the Principal Engineer is not busy or in a meeting. Be Open: Acknowledge their current style and express willingness to work together on finding a middle ground.

What do you think about something like that?

Hi [Principal Engineer's Name],

I really value your feedback and the insights you share during our meetings. They’ve been incredibly helpful in refining my work.
That said, I’d like to ask if it might be possible to provide me feedback privately or offline in the future—for example, via chat or a quick one-on-one. I find it easier to process and act on the feedback in a focused setting.

Let me know if that works for you, and thank you again for taking the time to share your thoughts. I really appreciate it!

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?

Hi Taro community,

I have gone through the in-depth explainers on Side projects and totally understand the importance of having good side projects on your resume. However, I have been working in the cloud-infra space in my recent company (Tech stack is heavily based on Python, SQL, JS and ElasticSearch) and was wondering how I could explain impact of any side projects in this space (like for apps we have downloads, for websites we have how many times visited, no. of signups, etc.), what kind of side projects could I target in the cloud infra space that can have some quantifiable impact as well?

Our office in Bellevue, WA has a beer pub next to it, is it common for people to get team building starting after work with a pizza or a draft IPA in company like Meta?

Offering advice or solutions without being asked, especially when you may not be fully informed about the situation, can come off as know-it-all behavior. Offer help or advice when it’s requested or when you're sure it's needed.

I'm senior level MLE but I have getting a lot recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn for staff level engineering but I don't feel like I have what it takes to succeed at that role. I'm not sure if there is guidelines or training program to prepare for this type of role?

What would be the next roles/avenues to look for, after being staff engineer for a couple of years? Does moving to a managerial role become easy after being a staff for a while, in terms of lateral/vertical hire and also managing the role once hired?

Hi, folks! I've been operating as a Staff Frontend Engineer for about ~5 years in my previous 2 companies. In those companies, I got promoted to the position, not joined as one. I usually argue this is much better/easier than joining as a Staff for the following reasons: You first build the trust and technical capital, and then you can operate as a Staff. You acquire strong and deep knowledge and context about the systems, allowing you to make better and more complex decisions. You are, probably, already the go-to person in your org and people come to you often to get unblocked. You know the whys, the whats, and the hows of the company's major systems and can make better accountable movements. You know what's expected from you as a Staff within the company (as we know, this position can be a huge source of ambiguity and uncertainty). And more! None of this is true when you are joining a company as a Staff (well, I'd say it's also true for other positions, but might be harder for Staff due to how recent these positions are present in our tech ecosystem). So I'd like to circle back to my initial question and complementary: Did you have such an experience already? If yes, how was that? If you're not a Staff, but work/worked with a Staff in such a situation, what was your expectation over his/her arrival? Tips/suggestions to build all the items I described above joining as a Staff? Thanks in advance!

What are some of the red flags one should look for when talking to potential managers during the Team Match at Meta?

I have 15+ years of experience working on fullstack/frontend. I have never done a really deep backend work. I just built CRUD APIs, using message queue, cron jobs, etc.

I'm interested in going into the backend to learn more. However, given my experience, it's really hard to find a job even one with a lower level. Is it too late for me to switch? Has anyone done this before?