What Does a Staff Engineer Actually Do
Trying to explain my job
A junior engineer asked me recently what a staff engineer actually does. And honestly, I had to think about it for a second. The role is weirdly undefined at most companies. From the outside it looks like a senior engineer with a better title – no direct reports, no budget responsibility, no “team” in the way most people mean it. What do you actually do all day?
The real answer, when the role is working the way it should, is that your main output isn’t code anymore. It’s leverage. You’re trying to make the whole organization more effective, not just yourself.
The multiplier thing
Early in your career, your impact maps pretty directly to how much stuff you personally produce. More code, more bugs fixed, more features shipped. Linear relationship. But at some point that model breaks. You can’t out-code a team of ten people no matter how fast you type. So if you want to keep growing your impact, you have to find ways to multiply your effort through other people.
That’s the job. Sometimes that means writing code – specifically the foundational, load-bearing kind that everyone else will build on. Sometimes it means designing systems and working through trade-offs on a whiteboard. Sometimes it means sitting with a mid-level engineer for an hour and helping them think through a problem instead of just solving it for them. Sometimes it means being in a room with product and business people, translating between what they want and what’s technically realistic.
The thread connecting all of that is: if you’re the only one who benefits from the work, you’re operating below your level.
How I spend my time
I’ve been thinking about this in terms of modes, because the day-to-day varies wildly.
There’s the architect mode, which is the most visible one – designing systems, reviewing designs, making the big technical calls. The key skill here isn’t being the smartest person in the room, it’s judgment. Can you figure out which decisions actually matter and get those right? Can you see where a system is going to break in six months?
Then there’s mentoring, which is probably the highest-impact thing I do even though it’s the least recognized. I try to ask questions rather than give answers. Point people toward resources instead of solving it myself. And it’s not just technical mentoring – it’s stuff like how to write a design doc that actually persuades people, or how to push back on a deadline without torching a relationship.
There’s the bridge mode, where I’m translating between engineering and everyone else. Explaining to a product leader why something will take three months, not three weeks. Giving the CTO an honest read on the state of the codebase. Making sure the platform team is building things that application teams actually need. This work is unglamorous but it prevents a ton of dysfunction.
And then there’s firefighting. Stuff breaks, the on-call person is stuck, and I get pulled in. This should be the rarest mode. If I’m constantly firefighting, something upstream is broken and I need to fix that instead.
The incentive problem
Here’s what’s frustrating: most performance review systems are designed to measure individual output. “Alice shipped feature X” is easy to measure. “Alice’s architecture advice prevented three incidents that would have cost a week each” is basically invisible. So there’s a constant pull back toward heads-down coding, not because that’s where you’re most valuable, but because that’s where you get recognized.
I’ve started keeping a log of the multiplier stuff I do – design reviews, mentoring sessions, cross-team alignment work – and making sure to bring it up with my manager. It feels a little self-promotional, which I hate. But if the work is invisible, the org can’t value it, and then nobody will do it.
If you’re thinking about the staff track
Start thinking in multipliers now, before you have the title. Look for chances to make the people around you better at their jobs. Invest hard in communication skills, because at this level your influence is limited by your ability to explain your thinking clearly. And find someone further down this path who can mentor you, because the terrain is not well mapped.
The impact you can have in this role is huge. It just doesn’t look like what any of us were trained to expect.