L5 Staff Software Engineer
Staff engineers are the technical architects of the organization. They're thinking several steps ahead, anticipating industry trends and positioning the company to capitalize on them. They're not just solving today's problems; they're preventing tomorrow's. Their influence extends across multiple teams or departments, and they play a crucial role in shaping the company's technical strategy. They're also nurturing the next generation of technical leaders, helping to scale their impact across the organization.
- Leads large, high-priority, cross-functional strategic projects
- Drives technical decisions that significantly impact company direction and growth
- Develops technical strategies aligned with long-term product vision
- Identifies and mitigates technical risks that could affect product success
- Influences company-wide engineering standards and practices
- Mentors senior engineers and helps develop technical leadership
- Represents the engineering perspective in high-level product strategy discussions
Expectations
| Capability | Needs Improvement | Meets Expectations | Exceeds Expectations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical Expertise | Struggles to contribute to technical strategy or to influence system architecture. Requires input from senior engineers to align with long-term goals. | Shapes the technical strategy for major product areas, making architectural decisions that enable new business capabilities and improve system reliability at scale. | Anticipates technical challenges that could impact company direction. Influences technical strategy across teams, advocating for best practices in architecture and system design. |
| Project Ownership | Struggles to manage larger or cross-functional projects, often misses critical deadlines, or fails to address risks proactively. | Orchestrates long-term initiatives that advance strategic business objectives, involving multiple workstreams and complex stakeholder requirements. Creates alignment across diverse organizational interests. | Achieves breakthrough outcomes on strategic initiatives by effectively aligning multiple teams and navigating significant technical uncertainty. |
| Business Impact | Has difficulty making connections between technical work and broader business goals; lacks the foresight to anticipate business risks or growth opportunities. | Regularly bridges technical and business goals, helping shape the product strategy in alignment with company objectives; anticipates potential risks or challenges. | Drives technical decisions that have a significant, long-term business impact; influences product strategy with technical feasibility analysis and forward-looking recommendations. |
| Communication & Collaboration | Struggles to navigate cross-team dependencies or collaborate effectively across departments. Communication gaps result in misalignment between teams or project delays. | Drives collaboration between multiple teams or departments, ensuring that communication flows smoothly and leads to well-aligned technical and business outcomes. | Builds strong relationships across departments, ensuring that communication and collaboration drive business outcomes. Effectively navigates cross-team dependencies and aligns strategic goals. |
| Mentorship & Support | Limited impact on mentoring others. Does not significantly contribute to the hiring process or struggles to lead interview panels. | Mentors senior and mid-level engineers, helping to guide their technical growth. Takes a leadership role in interview panels and helps shape hiring criteria. | Provides structured mentorship across teams and functions, helping to develop future technical leaders. Leads interview panels and makes strategic hiring decisions. |
| Leadership & Process Improvement | Limited impact on cross-team process improvements. Struggles to align best practices across teams or to lead meaningful process changes at a broader organizational level. | Leads process improvements that impact multiple teams or departments. Ensures best practices are followed across teams and works to align processes with the company’s strategic goals. | Drives significant process improvements across multiple teams or departments. Provides leadership on best practices across the organization, ensuring alignment with strategic goals. |
What makes a good L5 engineer?
When someone talks about a strongly performing L5 engineer}, you may hear that they:
- Lead large, cross-functional projects that have a significant impact on business outcomes, aligning technical decisions with company strategy.
- Develop technical strategies and write documentation that guides long-term technical decisions and system architecture.
- Work closely with product and business teams to ensure that technical insights influence key strategic decisions.
- Mentor other engineers, helping them take on leadership roles and grow their technical and non-technical skills.
- Identify and address long-term technical debt, ensuring the system can scale with future needs.
- Drive the adoption of new technologies that improve efficiency, reliability, and the overall user experience.
- Take a leadership role in process improvements that span multiple teams or departments, driving alignment and efficiency.
- Anticipate and mitigate technical risks before they become problems, ensuring smooth project delivery.
- Serve as a key communicator between engineering and executive teams, translating technical goals into business impact.
Managing L5 Staff Software Engineers
The primary goal when managing staff engineers is to help them maximize their organizational impact while maintaining their technical edge. Success at this level is about strategic influence, technical vision, and developing other technical leaders. At this level the manager and engineer may have similar levels of experience, so it is important to develop mutual trust for each other’s specialization and value.
Key approaches
- Partner with them as a strategic peer rather than a traditional manager
- Create visibility to company-wide challenges and opportunities
- Facilitate connections with key stakeholders across the organization
- Support their technical vision while helping align it with business strategy
- Shield them from organizational noise while keeping them informed of crucial context
- Help them navigate organizational politics and influence effectively
Development focus areas
- Technical strategy and long-term vision
- Organizational influence and change management
- Executive communication and stakeholder management
- Technical leadership development
- Cross-organizational program management
- Industry trends and technological innovation
- Enterprise architecture and system evolution
Measuring progress
- Long-term impact of technical decisions
- Success of major technical initiatives and velocity of value delivery
- Growth of technical leadership across team
- Adoption of technical standards and practices
- Quality of strategic technical planning
- Effectiveness in influencing company direction
- Development of other technical leaders
Common pitfalls to avoid
- Pulling them too far from technical work into pure management
- Not providing enough organizational context for decision-making
- Allowing them to become isolated from day-to-day engineering realities
- Failing to create appropriate platforms for their influence
- Not protecting their time for strategic thinking and planning