
Staff Engineering is often characterized not as a simple extension of Senior Engineer skills and impact, but a categorically different role. Silvia Botros’ “On Being A Principal Engineer”.Jessie Frazelle’s “Defining a Distinguished Engineer”.
Keavy McMinn’s “Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path”. Charity Majors’ “Things to know about engineering levels” and “The Engineer/Manager Pendulum”. The Rands Leadership and LeadDev Slack communities. Tanya Reilly’s recently released “The Staff Engineer’s Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change”. There are several high-quality resources for current and prospective Staff Engineers, in addition to Will’s: At that point your path branches, and you have the opportunity to pursue engineering management or continue down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer. Over the past decade, it has been popularized by Will Larson on, and in his eventual Staff Engineer book (published in 2021).Īt most technology companies, you’ll reach Senior Software Engineer, the career level, in five to eight years. Staff Engineer is a popular title and role now in use across many engineering career ladders. See the bottom of this page, or click the sidebar to read their stories. They’ve been kind enough to share their stories, in the model Will Larson pioneered.
In order to fill this gap, I’ve reached out to numerous Staff+ Security Engineers. Despite the relative glut of content however, security was not well represented. When I was on my path to Staff, I found tremendous value in the resources available about Staff+ Software Engineering.