Hiring Staff Engineers: The Complete Guide

# Staff Engineer

**Location:** San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Staff

## About [Company]

[Company] is a Series C developer tools company building infrastructure that powers modern software teams. Our platform serves 15,000+ engineering teams, processing 50M+ API requests daily.

We're a team of 180 people, including 70 engineers organized into cross-functional squads. We value technical excellence, deep collaboration, and building systems that scale. Our engineering culture emphasizes ownership, thoughtful architecture, and continuous learning.

**Why join [Company]?**

- Work on technically challenging problems at meaningful scale
- Join a team that values craft and invests in engineering excellence
- Strong IC career path with Staff, Principal, and Distinguished levels
- Competitive compensation with meaningful equity

## The Role

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to drive technical impact across our Platform organization. This is a senior Individual Contributor (IC) role—you'll spend 40-50% of your time writing code while providing technical leadership across multiple teams.

This is NOT a management position. You won't conduct performance reviews, handle HR issues, or manage people directly. You'll partner with Engineering Managers who handle people management while you focus on technical leadership: architecture decisions, cross-team technical initiatives, mentoring engineers, and solving the hardest problems.

The ideal candidate is a strong engineer who enjoys technical leadership without management responsibilities. You're excited about influencing how systems are built across teams, mentoring engineers, and tackling complex technical challenges.

## What This Role IS

- **Technical leadership across teams:** You'll drive architecture decisions and technical direction that impact multiple teams, not just your own
- **Hands-on coding:** You'll spend 40-50% of your time writing production code—this is an IC role, not a full-time leadership position
- **Mentorship-focused:** You'll help engineers grow through code reviews, pairing sessions, design reviews, and technical guidance
- **Cross-team impact:** You'll work on initiatives spanning multiple teams, driving alignment and solving problems that no single team can solve alone
- **Senior IC track:** This is the senior IC path, not management. Growth leads to Principal Engineer, then Distinguished Engineer

## What This Role is NOT

- **Not an Engineering Manager role:** You won't conduct performance reviews, handle HR issues, or manage people directly. We have Engineering Managers for that—you'll partner with them.
- **Not a Principal Engineer role:** Principal Engineers work at organizational level, setting company-wide technical strategy. Staff Engineers have cross-team impact but within a domain or organization.
- **Not a "Senior Engineer with a title":** This is a genuine step up in scope. You'll influence architecture across teams, drive multi-team initiatives, and mentor engineers across the organization.
- **Not a Tech Lead role:** Tech Leads typically focus on one team's technical direction. Staff Engineers have broader cross-team scope and less focus on day-to-day team execution.
- **Not a full-time architect role:** You'll make architecture decisions, but you'll also implement them. We don't have architects who don't code.

## Objectives of This Role

- Drive technical direction for the Platform organization's core systems
- Lead the design and implementation of our next-generation API infrastructure
- Improve engineering practices and code quality across multiple teams
- Mentor Senior Engineers to help them grow toward Staff level
- Reduce technical debt through strategic refactoring and architectural improvements
- Build alignment on technical decisions across teams with competing priorities

## Responsibilities

- Design and implement solutions to complex technical problems that span multiple teams
- Write production code (40-50% of time), particularly for foundational and architecturally significant work
- Lead technical design discussions and drive consensus on cross-team implementation approaches
- Conduct thorough code reviews focused on architecture, scalability, and long-term maintainability
- Mentor engineers across teams through pairing sessions, design reviews, and constructive feedback
- Set and evolve coding standards, architectural patterns, and technical documentation
- Evaluate new technologies and tools, making recommendations based on organizational needs
- Collaborate with Engineering Managers on technical hiring, team capacity, and project planning
- Communicate technical decisions, trade-offs, and risks to stakeholders at all levels
- Represent engineering in cross-functional discussions with Product, Design, and leadership

## Required Skills and Qualifications

- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in senior or staff-level roles
- Strong backend development skills with experience in distributed systems
- Track record of driving technical initiatives that impacted multiple teams
- Experience designing and building systems at scale (high throughput, low latency, high availability)
- Demonstrated mentoring ability—helping other engineers grow, not just shipping your own code
- Excellent technical communication skills for design docs, RFCs, and cross-team alignment
- Ability to influence technical decisions through leadership and consensus-building, not authority
- Experience navigating ambiguity and making decisions with incomplete information
- Strong debugging and problem-solving skills for complex distributed systems

## Preferred Skills and Qualifications

- Experience with API design and developer platform infrastructure
- Background in observability, monitoring, and production reliability
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and containerization (Kubernetes)
- Open source contributions or technical writing demonstrating thought leadership
- Experience working with geographically distributed teams
- Background in performance optimization and capacity planning

## Tech Stack

- **Languages:** Go (primary), TypeScript, Python
- **Frameworks:** gRPC, GraphQL, REST APIs
- **Databases:** PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse
- **Messaging:** Kafka, SQS, Redis Streams
- **Infrastructure:** AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
- **Observability:** Datadog, OpenTelemetry, PagerDuty
- **CI/CD:** GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Buildkite
- **Collaboration:** GitHub, Linear, Notion, Slack

## Compensation and Benefits

**Salary:** $200,000 - $260,000 (based on experience)

**Equity:** 0.10% - 0.20% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)

**Benefits:**

- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% covered for employees, 80% for dependents)
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- $4,000 annual learning budget (conferences, courses, certifications)
- $2,000 home office setup allowance
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- Flexible hybrid work (2-3 days in SF office)
- Monthly team events and annual engineering offsite
- Sabbatical program (4 weeks paid after 4 years)

## Interview Process

Our interview process typically takes 3-4 weeks. We provide detailed feedback at every stage and respect your time.

- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min) - We'll discuss your background, career interests, and what you're looking for in a Staff Engineer role.

- **Step 2: Hiring Manager Conversation** (45 min) - A discussion with the Engineering Director about your experience, how you approach technical leadership, and what kind of environment you thrive in.

- **Step 3: Technical Screen** (60 min) - A coding session focused on problem-solving and code quality. We want to see how you think, not trick you with gotcha questions.

- **Step 4: System Design Deep-Dive** (90 min) - Design a distributed system relevant to our domain. We're evaluating architectural thinking, trade-off analysis, scalability considerations, and ability to communicate technical decisions.

- **Step 5: Cross-Team Leadership Discussion** (60 min) - A conversation about how you approach cross-team technical leadership: driving alignment, influencing without authority, mentoring, and navigating ambiguity. We'll discuss real scenarios you've handled.

- **Step 6: Team Meet** (45 min) - Meet potential teammates across different teams, ask questions, and get a feel for how we collaborate.

We aim to make offers within 48 hours of final interviews.

## How to Apply

Submit your resume and optionally include links to your GitHub, technical blog, design docs, or anything that demonstrates your engineering approach and technical leadership. We review every application and respond within 5 business days.

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*[Company] is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We encourage applications from candidates who may not meet every qualification—research shows underrepresented groups tend to apply only when they meet 100% of requirements.*