Staff Engineer

Also known as: Staff Software Engineer, Principal Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer, Staff+ Engineer, Technical Lead.

What does a Staff Engineer do?

A Staff Engineer is an engineer one level above Senior who owns technical decisions that span several teams and drives them through influence rather than authority. They still write code, but the main result of their work is several teams building their systems in the same direction. Typical tasks:

• write design documents for changes that touch several services and see them through to agreement;
• take on hard technical problems that no single team owns end to end;
• set technical standards and check that new solutions follow them;
• prepare strong Senior Engineers for the next level through reviews and joint work;
• translate technical risks into business terms for the CTO and product leaders.

When does a company need a Staff Engineer?

A company needs a Staff Engineer when it has several engineering teams and their architectural decisions, made separately, start to drift apart. This is usually a company after Series A–B, where the CTO can no longer go deep into every technical decision and Team Leads are busy with their own teams. Common triggers: a large migration, a move to a new architecture, a growing number of incidents at the boundaries between services. If there is one team of fewer than ten engineers, a Staff Engineer will not find enough scope: hire a strong Senior Engineer or a Founding Engineer instead.

Staff Engineer vs Engineering Manager: what's the difference?

A Staff Engineer differs from an Engineering Manager in owning technical decisions rather than people: no direct reports, no hiring, no performance reviews. An Engineering Manager grows the team and owns its delivery; a Staff Engineer makes sure the systems of several teams are designed well. What sets a Staff Engineer apart from a Senior Engineer is scope: a Senior solves their team's problems, a Staff Engineer solves problems that cross team boundaries.

Staff Engineer vs related roles: comparison

Why is it hard to hire a Staff Engineer?

A Staff Engineer is hard to hire because the level is defined by influence beyond one's own team, and that is almost invisible in a CV.

• The Staff title means different things at different companies: at one it is the next step after Senior, at another it is an engineer who shapes the whole engineering organisation.
• Much of a Staff Engineer's work is documents, alignment and other people's decisions, which reads weaker in a CV than "built service X".
• The experience can only be gained at a company with several teams and a mature engineering ladder, and there are fewer of those than startups.
• Strong Staff Engineers are usually well placed, and changing jobs means losing the influence they have built up.

What to decide before hiring a Staff Engineer?

• What technical problem should this person solve in the first year? Without a concrete problem a Staff Engineer becomes a very expensive Senior Engineer.
• What authority will they have over other teams? If Team Leads can ignore their decisions, there will be no influence, and a strong candidate will leave quickly.
• Whom do they report to, and who is their partner at leadership level? Usually the CTO or VP Engineering; without such a partner a Staff Engineer's decisions lack weight.
• Is this a pure IC role, or will the person lead a team later? These are different profiles, and the answer changes whom to look for.

Where to find a Staff Engineer?

Staff Engineers most often come from companies with several dozen engineers and a formal engineering ladder: mature product companies, fintech, large SaaS and infrastructure products. A strong profile signal is public design documents, talks or open-source projects that show a decision made for many teams, as well as a promotion to Staff within one company. NEWHR finds such candidates by the results of their work, not by applications to a job post.

How to assess a Staff Engineer in an interview?

A Staff Engineer is assessed through a walkthrough of an architectural decision the candidate drove across several teams and a system design interview on the company's own problem. The CTO or VP Engineering and one or two Team Leads the future Staff Engineer will work with usually take part.

Strong signals:

• describes how they won over teams that initially opposed their solution;
• names a decision they reversed or simplified themselves and explains why;
• talks about the business consequences of technical decisions, not only about technologies.

Red flags:

• every example stays within the boundaries of one team;
• describes influence through position ("I decided, the team did") rather than through arguments;
• wants only to write code and avoids documents and alignment.

How long does it take to hire a Staff Engineer?

We present the first candidates for the Staff Engineer role within 5–7 days of the brief. NEWHR filled a Staff Platform Engineer role in London for Synthesized, a Series A synthetic data platform, in 1.5 months: the engineer was to scale the SaaS platform and later lead a team.

Related roles

• Platform Engineer — builds the internal developer platform; Staff is a level a Platform Engineer can also work at.
• SRE — owns service reliability and SLOs rather than architecture across teams.
• Chief Architect — owns the architecture of the whole company and usually sits above a Staff Engineer.
• CTO / VP Engineering — leads the engineering organisation and its people, while a Staff Engineer leads technical decisions without reports.
• Founding Engineer — the first engineer at a startup who does everything before there are teams.