Decoding the Staff Engineer Role
Introduction
I’m a technical recruiter of almost 10 years experience. My previous two engagements have been with Spotify and Personio (tech Unicorn with a myriad of technical leaders from FAANG & Tier 1 companies). I feel this puts me in a strong position to offer credible advice of what signals to look for when hiring a staff engineer.
I’m basing the below off what a staff engineer means at a ‘big tech’ company. Job titles, now more than ever seem to mean a variety of different things depending on what company you work for — another variable that makes life as a recruiter more challenging!
Right then, enough intro, let’s get into why you started reading.
The Staff Engineer
Historically, as you progress as an engineer you move into management and step up to ‘Head of’ roles to spearhead engineering. Essentially, as you progressed, you moved further away from being close to the technology. However, this isn’t the case in ‘big tech’ companies.
Your career forks once you reach a certain level, typically once you reach technical lead within a team. You can then either choose to follow the people management track i.e. engineering manager (EM) OR you can progress as an individual contributor (IC) — which allows you to still be hands-on with the technology.
The IC track would look something like staff engineer, senior staff engineer, principal engineer, as shown below..
What does a Staff Engineer do?
A key part of being a staff engineer is the ability to work with ambiguity and solve complex problems.
A staff engineer will typically sit outside of a team and operate with a larger scope. I.e. across multiple teams. They will then help more complex pieces of work, which helps a team meet their goals in line with business objectives.
Let’s say your engineering department is split into multiple units. Within each unit, you have a split of engineering teams, all specialising in specific niches of your product.
The example below shows an engineering unit split into four squads. You’ll see a staff engineer has interaction across the unit, rather than solely working in a specific team.
A staff engineer does not typically come with management responsibility. Instead, they will coach and mentor less experienced engineers to reach their career goals.
Get Daniel Holden’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The role is also closer to VPs / Heads of in the business, which allows staff engineers to be closer to the decision making process, understanding business objectives. This facilitates staff engineers to look at the work being done in the squads and ensure it’s inline with where the business wants to be.
What signals to look for?
We’ve already established they’re hands-on — meaning they have to be strong with both coding and architecture.
How do they mentor less experienced engineers? What frameworks, if any, do they use when understanding how to help the mentee?
You need to establish they’re still close to the technology. Asking what percentage of their role is still hands-on will give a good indication of this.
You want to hear examples of where they have self identified and driven the solution for a complex task.
How do they self reflect? E.g. Project they’ve had the biggest impact on? Biggest failure? What are their growth areas? For the latter, we want to see non-technical growth areas. A staff engineer is already at the forefront technically, so we’re looking for strong self-awareness in other areas.
How do I headhunt a Staff Engineer?
Plan A. Go to your ‘big tech’ companies and search for ‘staff engineer’ — although I can assure you, it’s not usually this simple!
Plan B. Plan A might not work. Even if it does, you will have to have a mighty compensation package to compete with companies such as META. So what else can you do?
Job titles are a good place to start. However, as previously mentioned you’ll find companies house staff engineers who operate under a different title e.g. as a technical lead.
Should you find a staff engineer at a less familiar company, scout their engineering department. What is the ratio between staff engineers to Software Engineers? There should be far fewer staff engineers.
Incorporate more titles into your search i.e. principal, ‘Head of’, and discover how close to the technology a person is. A ‘Head of Engineering’ can still be hands-on. Equally, a principal engineer from a smaller or lesser known company could be working on either the scale and/or complexity needed for your staff engineer role.
Look at experienced engineers who have left companies such as META. See where they are now and what they’re doing. Use your experience to decipher if a conversation could be worthwhile.
Back to the start. What is a Staff Engineer?
We’ve learnt that the role is an IC. Core fundamentals include coding, architecture and mentoring. The staff role is the next step up from a technical lead.
The role sits outside of a team to have impact across a larger scope. They’ll work with greater ambiguity and drive large, complex projects.
One aspect we haven’t covered is archetypes. This refers to the specialism of the staff engineer. From my experience you can have generalised and specialised archetypes. The former would be backend, full stack, front end and the latter would refer to machine learning, analytics and other specialised areas within the business. Some companies have archetypes, whereas others don’t. This is something you will have to learn more about within your business.
Thank you for reading!
It would be great to connect via LinkedIn and feel free to reach out.
