Staff+

⚠️ At this level things get very blurry and are usually organisation specific.

Not all seniors advance to this role, but these are the traits that correspond to Staff+ seniority.

Technical knowledge:

• Multiple projects finished in different languages bring new perspectives and insights into various ways of solving the problems

• Knowing when NOT to use patterns and stray from the general guidelines

• Getting back to basics; readability and changeability of the codebase is the top priority

• Stopping over-engineering solutions when simple ones can suffice

• Excellent error handling and logging

• Superb knowledge of all application processes (CI/CD pipelines, web server configurations, 3rd-party services configurations, deployments, etc.).

Learning skills are top level:

• New technologies can be learnt in a very short time to an adequate level

• In-depth evaluation of new trends and quick reasoning of pros/cons

• Consistency in learning and evaluating new technologies (not only for the job-specific tech).

Soft skills are top-notch:

• Bringing the most value to customer/product in limited resources vs making everything perfect

• Speak openly about the issues, pros and cons of solutions

• Empowering learning within a team by carefully introducing new technologies that superseded existing tech

• Delegation of tasks and responsibilities to team members (i.e. leave some core functionality to the other seniors on the team to free yourself some time for unexpected events)

Additionally, being a staff/principal developer often means that you have led a successful project in the scope of one or several organisations in the company. Things really get blurry at this stage outside of the big tech companies. The general consensus is that most people will get tenure at Medior or Senior developer. Reaching any level beyond that and being in the Individual Contributor track is rare and even though more (large) companies are introducing levels beyond senior it is often uncharted territory.