How Engineers Become Staff Engineers, Making an Impact (Part 1 of 4)

The Evolution of Technical Roles 🌟

When I started my career, a staff position wasn’t widely known. Back then, we recognized roles such as Junior Engineer, Engineer, Senior Engineer, Team or Technical Lead, Senior Team or Technical Lead, Architect, and Senior Architect. These were the main technical roles alongside the management track.

The rapid pace of technological advancement has directly influenced both job roles and responsibilities. Early in my career, for instance, our team didn’t even have a product manager. We were developing a gaming platform, but there wasn’t anyone with deep market insights or a focus on customer research to guide our direction. Instead, decisions were made collectively by team members who "knew better" but spent little time engaging with customers or assessing their requests. Looking back, I’m amazed at how much time we wasted reimplementing the same features simply because we failed to filter out bad client suggestions upfront.

To be fair, the concept of the Staff Engineer role was already being discussed before I started my career, dating back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. The rise of large technology companies and the need for technical leadership beyond traditional team leads drove the formalization of this role. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon played key roles in defining what a Principal or Staff Engineer does, particularly within their respective engineering organizations.

The Challenges of Defining Roles 🏷️

Even in those early days, these companies had slightly different definitions of technical roles. To this day, there is a lack of common metrics across organizations to measure the success of roles. The same title might carry completely different expectations depending on the company. Imagine two job openings at two companies — both labeled as the same role, but with vastly different responsibilities and criteria for success.

To complicate things further, these metrics are often abstract and subjective, varying depending on who you talk to. Because job titles and their associated responsibilities are so vaguely defined, career growth and promotions often become equally ambiguous.

The Core of Success: Soft and Cognitive Skills 💡

While roles and metrics differ, there is one common thread that can be grouped into a larger set: soft and cognitive skills. Soft skills define how you work with others and manage yourself, and cognitive skills are the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension. Here are soft and cognitive skills I believe are essential for a Staff Engineer:

• Impact
• Ownership
• Communication
• Organization
• Adaptability
• Critical thinking
• Creativity
• Self-awareness

Of course, no engineer will embody these traits to the fullest — but they offer a framework for growth. Staff Engineers are not a one-size-fits-all role; rather, these skills manifest through different Archetypes, which are not mutually exclusive.

Archetypes of a Staff Engineer 🧩

If we were to categorize Staff Engineers, here’s how they might look:

• The Architect 🏗️

  • Strengths: Deep technical knowledge, architectural vision, problem-solving skills.
  • Soft Skills: Clear communication, stakeholder management, critical thinking.
  • Role: Designs system architectures, ensuring scalability, performance, and reliability.

• The Mentor 🤝

  • Strengths: Collaboration, mentorship, deep technical knowledge.
  • Soft Skills: Communication, emotional intelligence, self-awareness.
  • Role: Guides junior engineers and fosters a culture of continuous learning.

• The Influencer 🌟

  • Strengths: Decision-making, influencing without authority, stakeholder management.
  • Soft Skills: Clear communication, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence.
  • Role: Aligns stakeholders and bridges technical and non-technical teams.

• The Innovator 💡

  • Strengths: Creativity, problem-solving, innovation.
  • Soft Skills: Adaptive thinking, emotional intelligence.
  • Role: Drives organizational innovation and seeks new solutions.

• The Executor ✅

  • Strengths: Organizational skills, execution, planning.
  • Soft Skills: Prioritization, adaptability.
  • Role: Delivers projects on time by removing obstacles and maintaining focus.

• The Bridge Builder 🌉

  • Strengths: Collaboration, communication.
  • Soft Skills: Building relationships, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence.
  • Role: Facilitates collaboration and alignment across teams.

• The Problem Solver 🔧

  • Strengths: Technical expertise, adaptability.
  • Soft Skills: Analytical thinking, effective communication.
  • Role: Tackles and solves complex challenges in high-impact projects.

• The Visionary 🌅

  • Strengths: Innovation, long-term thinking.
  • Soft Skills: Communication, stakeholder alignment.
  • Role: Defines the technical vision and long-term strategy of the organization.

• The Caretaker 🫶

  • Strengths: Mentorship, emotional intelligence.
  • Soft Skills: Listening, self-awareness.
  • Role: Ensures team well-being and fosters growth within the team.

A true Staff Engineer will most likely embody a combination of these archetypes, playing to their natural strengths while supporting their team and organization.

Making an Impact: The Defining Factor 🎯

Ultimately, the key question every aspiring or current Staff Engineer must ask themselves is: “What impact do I have?”

Impact is the key factor differentiating a senior engineer from a Staff Engineer. Senior Engineers lift their team, while Staff Engineers extend their impact beyond the team. Through their expertise and judgment, a Staff Engineer knows how to maximize their limited time by acting as a multiplier. Let me share an example to illustrate this idea.

A Practical Case Study 🧑‍🔬

In the past, I encountered a tricky technical issue: the microservice I was working on wasn’t processing certain events. Strangely, all tests designed to catch this scenario were passing, so I knew the issue wasn’t in the code — but the root cause was elusive. Frustrated, I reached out to a colleague for help. That conversation taught me the value of targeted logging.

Together, we identified several areas likely responsible for the error and added logs in critical spots. After redeploying the code to production, it became a waiting game. When I reviewed the logs the next day, the issue became obvious: a RuntimeException was being swallowed by a try-catch block. With the new logging in place, the problem was immediately visible and quickly fixed.

But the real takeaway wasn’t just solving the issue — it was the lesson I learned about debugging, which I continued to use and share.

Three Paths to Problem-Solving 🛠️

When an engineer faces a challenge, they can handle it in one of three ways:

1. Solve the problem themselves and move on.
2. Solve the problem and share their knowledge to help others solve similar issues in the future.
3. Encourage other engineers to solve the problem, support them, and reflect together on the learnings and the outcome.

The second and third approach is always preferable, as it promotes knowledge-sharing, team growth, and resilience. As the saying goes:
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

Sharing knowledge makes you a force multiplier, empowering others to overcome challenges and amplifying your overall impact.

What’s Your Story? 🌱

Is a staff-level role something you aspire to? Or are you already a Staff Engineer, recalling the early days when you were still building your influence? Either way, it always comes down to the same question: “What impact do I have?"

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Jernej Klancic

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