The Reality of Being a Staff Engineer  🔗 **Source:** [The Reality of Being a Staff Engineer](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: #staff-engineering #career-development #technical-leadership > author: Krys Flores > source: LeadDev > reference: https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer > date created: 2024-12-19 12:30 > > # 🏷️ Title: The reality of being a staff engineer > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧰 Action Inbox - [H1] Develop cross-team relationship building strategy — Staff role requires coordination across multiple teams and timezones #staff-engineering - [H2] Create structured technical writing practice — Documentation and design docs are core deliverables #technical-writing - [H3] Build AI integration training program — New responsibility for staff engineers in 2024+ #ai-engineering ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [[#📝 Summary]] - [[#📖 Main Content]] - [[#🗒️ Notes]] - [[#📚 References]] - [[#🗣️ Paraphrase]] - [[#📰 Newsletter]] - [[#✅ Action Items]] - [[#🧪 Hypotheses]] - [[#📊 Methodology]] - [[#❓ Questions]] - [[#🔮 Future Research]] - [[#💡 Implications]] - [[#🧠 Learning Styles Assessment]] - [[#📊 Accessibility Assessment]] - [[#🌍 DEIB Assessment]] - [[#✅ Logical Validity]] - [[#🛡️ DARVO Analysis]] - [[#🎯 Conclusion]] ### 🔗 References - [The reality of being a staff engineer](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer) - [LeadDev Career Development](https://leaddev.com/career-development) ## 📝 Summary - Staff engineering is fundamentally about horizontal coordination across teams rather than deeper technical work within a single team - The role involves significant non-coding work including technical writing, relationship building, and process design - AI tools are changing both how staff engineers work and adding new responsibilities around AI adoption and training - Success requires comfort with ambiguity, strong writing skills, and strategic thinking about when to code versus delegate - The biggest challenge is coordinating multiple people across teams and timezones, not the technical complexity ## 📖 Main Content Staff engineers face a fundamental misconception about their role. While many assume it's simply senior engineering "with the dial turned up," the reality involves a 90-degree shift from vertical depth to horizontal coordination. Krys Flores, a staff engineer at Crunchyroll, describes the role as "connective tissue" between teams rather than a pure technical position. The transition from senior to staff engineering involves moving from deep focus on single-team problems to wide coordination across multiple teams' interconnected challenges. This includes reviewing technical designs, investigating cross-service issues, and serving as subject matter expert for systems that span organizational boundaries. A significant portion of staff engineering work involves what Flores calls "herding cats" - coordinating multiple stakeholders across teams and timezones to reach decisions. The technical challenges, while complex, are often less difficult than the coordination challenges of getting the right people to engage with the right context at the right time. AI tools are reshaping the staff engineering role in 2024 and beyond. Beyond personal productivity gains, staff engineers are increasingly responsible for organizational AI adoption, including designing training curricula and establishing best practices for AI-native engineering workflows. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#introduction) — [H1] Staff engineering misconceptions - Key idea: Staff engineering is about coordination and breadth, not just advanced coding - Evidence: "The role is less about writing code yourself and more about making sure the right code gets written by the right people at the right time" #### ⏱️ [02:30](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#horizontal-job) — [H1] The horizontal shift from senior to staff - Key idea: Work axis rotates 90 degrees from deep team focus to cross-team coordination - Evidence: "As a senior engineer, I went deep on my team's problems. As a staff engineer, I go wide across teams' problems" #### ⏱️ [05:15](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#cross-team-work) — [H2] Cross-team system ownership challenges - Key idea: Staff engineers work on systems that span multiple teams and domains - Evidence: "No single team owns the full path from a user opening a partner's set-top box to seeing personalized Crunchyroll recommendations" #### ⏱️ [08:00](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#herding-cats) — [H1] Coordination is harder than technology - Key idea: The biggest challenge is people coordination, not technical complexity - Evidence: "Getting seven people from four teams in three time zones to converge on a decision before the window closes" #### ⏱️ [10:45](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#design-reviews) — [H2] Technical design review process - Key idea: Design reviews require both logistics and culture change to be effective - Evidence: "Half of making that work is logistics, half is culture – convincing engineers that presenting an ugly-but-honest early draft is better than presenting a polished document after the code is already written" #### ⏱️ [13:20](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#different-code) — [H2] Code writing evolves in nature and scope - Key idea: Still writing significant code, but different types including infrastructure-as-documentation - Evidence: "I recently shipped a 14-part stacked pull request series for a prototype, building out the service layer, CLI scripts, data pipelines, and Databricks notebooks" #### ⏱️ [16:00](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#incident-response) — [H3] Documentation as infrastructure - Key idea: Postmortems and runbooks are critical infrastructure that doesn't compile - Evidence: "That document is infrastructure too. It just doesn't compile" #### ⏱️ [18:30](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#ai-changes) — [H1] AI reshaping staff engineer responsibilities - Key idea: AI changes not just productivity but adds new organizational responsibilities - Evidence: "It changes what a staff engineer is responsible for. I'm currently building and leading a 12-week pilot AI engineering training program" #### ⏱️ [21:15](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#ai-tools) — [H2] AI tooling for incident response - Key idea: AI tools enable faster investigation and analysis workflows - Evidence: "I used my tools to correlate JWKS fetch errors across services, produce a Datadog notebook with the relevant traces and metrics, and draft the investigation summary, in hours rather than days" #### ⏱️ [23:45](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#ai-training) — [H2] Staff engineers leading AI adoption - Key idea: Staff engineers are uniquely positioned to drive practical AI integration - Evidence: "If you understand both the technology and how engineers actually work, you're the right person to figure out how AI tools should be integrated" #### ⏱️ [26:00](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#essential-skills) — [H1] Core staff engineer skill requirements - Key idea: Success requires comfort with ambiguity and strong communication skills - Evidence: "Comfort with ambiguity: senior engineers get well-scoped problems. Staff engineers get 'we need to support hundreds of future partner integrations and the system doesn't exist. Build it.'" #### ⏱️ [28:30](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#writing-skills) — [H2] Technical writing as essential skill - Key idea: Clear writing is non-negotiable for staff-level impact - Evidence: "If you can't write clearly, you can't operate at this level. Period" #### ⏱️ [30:15](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#delegation) — [H2] Strategic coding versus delegation decisions - Key idea: Knowing when to build versus when to enable others is crucial for scale - Evidence: "I can build the prototype, document the patterns, and let the team run with it. The second approach scales" #### ⏱️ [32:00](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer#relationships) — [H3] Proactive relationship building across organization - Key idea: Cross-org relationships must be built before they're needed - Evidence: "That comes from months of showing up in other teams' channels, reviewing their designs, and being helpful when they didn't ask for it" ## 📚 References - [The reality of being a staff engineer](https://leaddev.com/career-development/the-reality-of-being-a-staff-engineer) - [Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track](https://staffeng.com/) - [The Staff Engineer's Path](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-staff-engineers/9781098118723/) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - Staff engineering fundamentally shifts from deep technical work within teams to broad coordination across organizational boundaries, requiring more relationship management than pure coding - The primary challenge becomes aligning multiple stakeholders across teams and timezones rather than solving complex technical problems, with significant time spent on communication and process facilitation - AI tools are creating new responsibilities for staff engineers beyond productivity gains, including organizational AI adoption strategy and training program development ## 📰 Newsletter **Staff Engineering Reality Check: It's About People, Not Just Code** If you're considering the leap from senior to staff engineer, here's the reality check you need: the hardest part isn't the technology. Krys Flores from Crunchyroll breaks down what staff engineering actually looks like - and it's more about "herding cats" than writing advanced algorithms. The role shifts from deep technical work to wide coordination across teams, with significant time spent getting stakeholders aligned rather than coding. **Key insight**: Staff engineers spend more time in design reviews, incident coordination, and cross-team communication than in their IDE. Success requires comfort with ambiguity, exceptional writing skills, and strategic thinking about when to code versus delegate. **AI angle**: The role is evolving rapidly as staff engineers become responsible for organizational AI adoption, creating training programs and establishing best practices for AI-native workflows. Ready to level up your coordination skills alongside your technical expertise? Resources: [Staff Engineer Path](https://staffeng.com/), [Technical Writing Guide](https://developers.google.com/tech-writing), [Engineering Leadership Resources](https://leaddev.com/) ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - Developer advocacy: Create content on staff engineer career transitions, coordination best practices - Education: Develop workshops on technical writing and cross-team collaboration - Developer experience: Build templates for technical design documents and incident postmortems - Developer marketing: Share realistic expectations about staff engineering roles - Community management: Facilitate discussions on engineering career progression #### Community - Maintainers: Support governance structures for multi-team coordination - Contributors: Create pathways for senior engineers to practice cross-team collaboration - Sponsors: Fund training programs for technical leadership skills - Ecosystem: Enable knowledge sharing between staff engineers across organizations #### WordPress - Core Program Team: Establish staff-level coordination roles for cross-team initiatives - Community: Develop mentorship programs for senior-to-staff transitions - Training: Create curriculum on technical leadership and coordination skills - Documentation: Build templates for cross-team technical design documents - Meta: Define staff engineer roles and responsibilities within WordPress.org structure ## 🧪 Hypotheses - Staff engineer effectiveness correlates more with communication and coordination skills than with pure technical depth - AI tool adoption will become a standard responsibility for staff engineers across organizations by 2025 - Cross-team coordination challenges scale non-linearly with organizational size and geographic distribution - Technical writing quality is a stronger predictor of staff engineer success than coding speed ### 📊 Methodology - Survey staff engineers on time allocation between coding, coordination, and documentation - Analyze correlation between technical writing assessments and promotion success rates - Study incident response times before/after AI tool implementation - Compare coordination effectiveness across different organizational structures ### ❓ Questions - How should organizations structure incentives for staff engineers given the coordination focus? - What specific training programs best prepare senior engineers for staff-level coordination challenges? - How will AI tool integration change the baseline expectations for staff engineer productivity? ### 🔮 Future Research - Long-term career satisfaction comparison between management and staff engineer tracks - Impact of remote work on staff engineer coordination effectiveness - Best practices for staff engineer onboarding and role transition ### 💡 Implications - Practice: Engineering managers need to adjust expectations and evaluation criteria for staff engineers - Policy: Organizations should create explicit coordination time allocations and success metrics - Education: Engineering curricula should include technical communication and project coordination skills - Funding: Investment in technical writing tools and cross-team collaboration platforms becomes critical ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment Reading level estimate: Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 11 #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: Clear section headers and bullet points - Improve: Add organizational charts showing staff engineer relationships, workflow diagrams #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: Conversational tone with direct quotes - Improve: Audio summary of key coordination strategies, interview format #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Clear definitions of role differences, concrete examples - Improve: Glossary of coordination terms, analogy-based explanations #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: Practical examples and specific scenarios - Improve: Interactive checklists for design reviews, coordination templates #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: Clear progression from senior to staff responsibilities - Improve: Decision trees for code-vs-delegate choices, metrics framework #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: Team coordination examples and relationship building advice - Improve: Peer discussion prompts, collaboration exercises #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: Self-reflection opportunities on career direction - Improve: Self-assessment rubric for staff engineer readiness #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: Ecosystem thinking about organizational coordination - Improve: Systems thinking exercises, organizational ecology metaphors ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: Clear heading hierarchy, descriptive section titles - Improve: Add role definitions to abbreviations, expand technical acronyms #### Keyboard navigation - Present: Standard web navigation structure - Improve: Skip links for long content sections, keyboard shortcuts #### Contrast and readability - Present: High contrast text and clean layout - Improve: Ensure code examples meet contrast requirements #### Text resizing and reflow - Present: Responsive design at standard zoom levels - Improve: Test at 200% zoom for mobile devices #### Media and captions - Present: Text-only content, no embedded media - Improve: N/A - no multimedia content #### Forms and interactions - Present: No interactive forms - Improve: N/A - article format ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: Single company example (Crunchyroll) with global context - Improve: Multiple industry examples, international coordination challenges #### Inclusive language - Present: Gender-neutral terms, accessible technical language - Improve: Define more technical jargon, add plain language summaries #### Neurodiversity support - Present: Clear structure with consistent formatting - Improve: Add executive summary, break up longer paragraphs #### Representation - Present: Single author perspective from streaming industry - Improve: Multiple voices from different industries and backgrounds #### Psychological safety - Present: Honest discussion of role challenges and misconceptions - Improve: Address imposter syndrome concerns, normalize coordination struggles ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - Inductive strength: Uses specific Crunchyroll examples to generalize about staff engineering - Analogical strength: Effective comparison to film director role - Causal reasoning: Clear connection between AI adoption and expanded staff responsibilities #### Fallacies - Hasty generalization: Single company experience generalized to all staff engineering roles - False dichotomy: Implies strict senior-to-staff progression without lateral alternatives - Appeal to novelty: Suggests AI responsibilities are universally required without evidence #### Tone of voice - Overall tone: Conversational and realistic, uses direct experience and practical examples <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** ![[Full Document Contents/Articles/The Reality of Being a Staff Engineer.md|The Reality of Being a Staff Engineer by leaddev.com]] ## Highlights - • **Staff engineering is horizontal, not vertical**. The shift from senior to staff is about going wide across teams and getting people who don’t report to you to make decisions. • The hard part is never the technology: getting seven people from four teams in three time zones to show up with context is where the real work lives. • **AI is changing** what staff engineers are responsible for, not just how fast they work. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kq2qzpq80ett0sxrvje6jsm4)) - When people hear “[staff engineer](https://leaddev.com/leadership/what-staff-engineer-technical-leaders-arent-managers),” they often picture someone who writes more code, faster, on harder problems. A senior engineer with the dial turned up. In practice, the role is less about writing code yourself and more about making sure the right code gets written by the right people at the right time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kq2qydycvvs052wvwh7vnqm3)) - Tags: 👻 ai highlighted - The biggest shift from senior to staff was the axis of my work rotating 90 degrees. As a [senior engineer](https://leaddev.com/leadership/creating-the-next-generation-of-senior-engineers), I went deep on my team’s problems. As a [staff engineer](https://leaddev.com/career-development/how-get-promoted-beyond-staff-engineer), I go wide across teams’ problems. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kq2qydyjmryx2kq13hnabqa6)) - Tags: 👻 ai highlighted