In my corner of Amazon, PEs are the technical peer to high-level people/program managers. The people/project managers are there to make sure that human work proceeds according to plan and have small understanding or concern for nitty gritty technical architecture. In comparison, the PEs have small understanding of the nitty gritty of the human labor management and are there to drive design reviews and act as kind of a veto board for architectural decisions.
PEs rarely provide new ideas in design reviews (our product teams don't need help with that) but often will strike things down or modify existing ideas to fit in with other products, for business reasons, or perhaps because their human management counterpart doesn't like the idea.
Alongside, they usually have some variety of R&D style side projects that they pursue according to their interests/specialties.
You can be more specific using the role guidelines.
Principal Engineers work on projects that span the entire organisation, usually addressing cross cutting concerns of several teams. They advice Directors and VPs on strategical, mid/long term technical decisions. They set the standards of quality for the org and engage with the community at large. They work on extremely complex and highly ambiguous problems.
In a chat with a PE he told me that this is the first role where he wasn't told what to do. In that sense, PEs often proactively look for problems to solve or new initiatives that will have a large positive impact in the company, rather than work in items assigned by others.
Lastly PEs are expected to have strong communication and interpersonal skills. They should be a force multiplier, align teams and handle scalations.
Comments
In my corner of Amazon, PEs are the technical peer to high-level people/program managers. The people/project managers are there to make sure that human work proceeds according to plan and have small understanding or concern for nitty gritty technical architecture. In comparison, the PEs have small understanding of the nitty gritty of the human labor management and are there to drive design reviews and act as kind of a veto board for architectural decisions.
PEs rarely provide new ideas in design reviews (our product teams don't need help with that) but often will strike things down or modify existing ideas to fit in with other products, for business reasons, or perhaps because their human management counterpart doesn't like the idea.
Alongside, they usually have some variety of R&D style side projects that they pursue according to their interests/specialties.
You can be more specific using the role guidelines.
Principal Engineers work on projects that span the entire organisation, usually addressing cross cutting concerns of several teams. They advice Directors and VPs on strategical, mid/long term technical decisions. They set the standards of quality for the org and engage with the community at large. They work on extremely complex and highly ambiguous problems.
In a chat with a PE he told me that this is the first role where he wasn't told what to do. In that sense, PEs often proactively look for problems to solve or new initiatives that will have a large positive impact in the company, rather than work in items assigned by others.
Lastly PEs are expected to have strong communication and interpersonal skills. They should be a force multiplier, align teams and handle scalations.
Thanks, that is mind expanding. I'm young in my career and I don't think I've looked at the role guidelines for any role other than my own.