Beyond Senior: Consider the staff path! - Joel Hawksley

Staff engineers are the next step after senior, giving engineers a way to increase impact without moving into people management. The role expands both the breadth and depth of work, letting you own problems that span multiple teams or dive deep into complex technical challenges. Joel Hawksley illustrates this shift with his own journey at GitHub, where he moved from a mid-level engineer to staff by creating and scaling ViewComponent, leading a virtual team of a dozen engineers, and driving a company-wide design system migration.

Scope at the staff level is either broader or deeper than senior work. Instead of staying within a single team, staff engineers may coordinate efforts across several groups, report to directors, and influence product direction. Hawksley's experience shows both paths: he coordinated cross-team adoption of ViewComponent (breadth) and tackled hard technical problems like integrating the component into Rails itself (depth). These examples demonstrate how staff engineers can steer long-running initiatives that take months or years to complete.

The role can be understood through four archetypes: Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, and Right Hand. As a Tech Lead, Hawksley stepped in for absent managers, handling hiring and reviews. As an Architect, he set technical direction for critical areas like the design system. As a Solver, he crafted novel solutions, such as the upstream Rails patch for ViewComponent. As a Right Hand, he drafted strategic plans for directors and evaluated new tooling. The archetypes help staff engineers align expectations with managers and focus their effort.

Practical habits make the staff role sustainable. Aligning with archetypes, keeping a public journal of work, forecasting technical trends, and speaking truth to power with data keep influence grounded. Reducing ambiguity, delegating ownership, generating energy through mentoring, and delivering success on high-stakes projects round out the day-to-day playbook. These tactics turn the abstract notion of "staff engineer" into concrete actions that drive career growth and organizational impact.