What is a Staff Engineer?

While today I believe there is decent knowledge about the Engineering Manager role (hopefully, in part, thanks to this newsletter! 🙂), it doesn’t seem to be the case for the Staff Engineer role. Questions that I frequently get are: What is a Staff Engineer? What do they do? While I understand the nature of this role, I must admit that I have never had direct experience with it. This is because we don’t have such a role in my department at Namecheap. That’s why I decided to invite my friend, Raviraj from Meta (the company behind Facebook and Instagram), to co-author this article. So before everything, I'll let him introduce himself. Hey! I am Raviraj, a Staff Engineer at Meta, and I work in Meta's internal cloud. I worked at Microsoft for 4 years before switching to Meta in 2016. I grew to become a tech lead and was eventually promoted to Staff Engineer 3 years ago. Raviraj also writes a great newsletter, Techlead Mentor, where he shares stories, tips and advice about Tech Leadership.

While today I believe there is decent knowledge about the Engineering Manager role (hopefully, in part, thanks to this newsletter! 🙂), it doesn’t seem to be the case for the Staff Engineer role. Questions that I frequently get are: What is a Staff Engineer? What do they do? While I understand the nature of this role, I must admit that I have never had direct experience with it. This is because we don’t have such a role in my department at Namecheap. That’s why I decided to invite my friend, Raviraj from Meta (the company behind Facebook and Instagram), to co-author this article. So before eve