The Staff Engineer's Path

If you don’t understand how decisions are made in your organization or company, you’ll find yourself unable to anticipate or influence them.

Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb, often hands out stickers that say: “Nines don’t matter when users aren’t happy.” “Nines” here refers to service level objectives (SLOs), a common mechanism for measuring system availability. “Three and a half nines of availability” means that 99.95% of the time, the service is up and running. SLOs are useful, but a

But technology is a means to some end.

Whenever I interview a job candidate, their first question is often, “What’s the culture like?” I used to struggle to answer; where do you even start? Tomes have been written on organizational culture. Now, though, I think most of the time people are really asking these questions: How much autonomy will I have? Will I feel included? Will it be safe

When you started out as an engineer, your manager probably told you what to work on and how to approach it. At senior level, maybe your manager advised you on which problems were important to solve, and left it to you to figure out what to do about it. At staff+ levels, your manager should be bringing you information and sharing context, but you sh

Job ladders vary from company to company,

When the path is undefined and confusing, sometimes you need to get the group to agree on a plan and create the missing map. This map often comes in the form of a technical vision, describing a future state you want to get to, or a technical strategy, outlining how you plan to navigate challenges and achieve specific goals.

Staff engineers often take on ambiguous, messy, difficult problems and do just enough work on them to make them manageable by someone else. Once the problem is tractable, it becomes a growth opportunity for less experienced engineers (sometimes with support from the staff engineer).

Whenever there’s a feeling of “someone should do something here,” there’s a reasonable chance that the someone is you.