This week's anonymously submitted question is:
What skills are required to become a staff engineer, and what do they do more than a senior engineer?
As many of you might know, I ended my career at WeTransfer as a Staff iOS Engineer. This is often the level after a Senior engineer, and there are only a few Staff engineers per company.
If there’s been one challenge I’ve had with other Staff engineers at WeTransfer, it was defining who we are and what others in the company expect from us. A great resource available helped us in the right direction:
staffeng.com.
I’ve personally seen my role as making the mobile squad, not only iOS, as efficient as possible. I aimed to open doors and opportunities for both our products and individual peers, and I made sure our roadmaps prepared us for challenges in the future.
Zooming in I’d say a Senior engineer is more tightly connected to the mobile project itself, say literally, making architectural decisions inside Xcode. As a Staff, you’ll step out of your mobile silo, exploring opportunities across teams across the company. You should be prepared to learn about technologies outside of mobile and feel comfortable joining meetings with leadership teams.
Yet, each company defines its role differently. I’ve seen people join another company as a Principal engineer while being a Senior before. The same goes for the other way around. The role is defined solely based on expectations set for it.
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