The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

Review
If you're a senior engineer wondering what the next level is, a staff-level engineer or a manager of staff engineers, this book is for you. It covers so many of the things no one tells you about this role-things that take long years, even with great mentors, to discover on your own.
—Gergely Orosz, Author of The Pragmatic Engineer
Tanya is the perfect author for this exceptional guide to navigating the murky role of staff-plus engineering. Her deep, direct experience comes through in every section.
—Will Larson, CTO of Calm, author of Staff Engineer
This book feels like the missing manual for my whole career. It's amazingly reassuring to see the ambiguity of the role laid out in print, along with great specific guidance on time management, consensus building, etc. I'm going to cite this a lot.
—Titus Winters, principal engineer at Google, coauthor of Software Engineering at Google
The job of senior leadership as an individual contributor has long been ambiguous and difficult to define, and this book is a much-needed guide on being successful in a relatively new role to our industry. Tanya does an excellent job bringing large-company perspective and scaling company challenges for a rounded view on how to be a successful staff engineer.
—Silvia Botros, Coauthor of High Performance MySQL, 4th Edition, and principal engineer
The book I wish I'd had when I stepped up to Principal Engineer.
—Sarah Wells, independent Consultant and Author, former principal engineer at the Financial Times
For years, companies have rewarded their most effective engineers with management positions. But treating management as the default path for an engineer with leadership ability doesn't serve the industry well--or the engineer. The staff engineer's path allows engineers to contribute at a high level as role models, driving big projects, determining technical strategy, and raising everyone's skills.
This in-depth book shows you how to understand your role, manage your time, master strategic thinking, and set the standard for technical work. You'll read about how to be a leader without direct authority, how to plan ahead to make the right technical decisions, and how to make everyone around you better, while still growing as an expert in your domain.
By exploring the three pillars of a staff engineer's job, Tanya Reilly, a veteran of the staff engineer track, shows you how to: Take a broad, strategic view when thinking about your work Dive into practical tactics for making projects succeed Determine what "good engineering" means in your organization