This varies wildly by company, and dynamics of the org/team. The best summary I’ve found is the staff/principal engineer archetypes article[1] by Will Larson. He identified 4 archetypes: Team Leader, Architect, Solver and Right Hand. This categorisation broadly matches my own observations & experience at Uber - even if the formal, internal company definition does not put these as such.
This comes after he interviewed close to a dozen staff/principal engineers at various companies of the likes of Stripe, Mailchimp, Fastly, Slack, Split and others. The stories/interviews[2] are worth reading to get a better picture of exactly what staff/principal looks at each of these companies.
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This varies wildly by company, and dynamics of the org/team. The best summary I’ve found is the staff/principal engineer archetypes article[1] by Will Larson. He identified 4 archetypes: Team Leader, Architect, Solver and Right Hand. This categorisation broadly matches my own observations & experience at Uber - even if the formal, internal company definition does not put these as such.
This comes after he interviewed close to a dozen staff/principal engineers at various companies of the likes of Stripe, Mailchimp, Fastly, Slack, Split and others. The stories/interviews[2] are worth reading to get a better picture of exactly what staff/principal looks at each of these companies.
[1] https://lethain.com/staff-engineer-archetypes/
[2] https://staffeng.com/stories
Great links; thank you.