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Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track

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Nice blog post about staff (or engineering manager) archetypes:

Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track
  • The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a particular team. They partner closely with a single manager, but sometimes they partner with two or three managers within a focused area. Some companies also have a Tech Lead Manager role, which is similar to the Tech Lead archetype but exists on the engineering manager ladder and includes people management responsibilities.
  • The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership.
  • The Solver digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. Some focus on a given area for long periods. Others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership.
  • The Right Hand extends an executive's attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations.
This blog also has a nice cal overview to visualize the different working approaches for each archetype:
Example calendar for a Tech Lead archetype


If you want to read about this, checkout the book Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track!

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