Part 11 · 1 chapters · ~8 min
The Staff Engineer's Path
Tanya Reilly's guide to technical leadership without managing people: three pillars of big-picture thinking, project execution and levelling up others, maps of the organisation, choosing work against limited resources, leading big projects, being a role model, and multiplying others.
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The Staff Engineer's Path
The book most directly about the role you are aiming for. Its central claim is that staff work is mostly not code, while staying technical enough to be trusted on technical decisions.
| pillar | what it looks like this quarter | Learna course |
|---|---|---|
| big picture | a one-page technical direction for money flows in the app, with the three bets and what you will not do | Architecture, Systems Engineering |
| project execution | a cross-team project with a written plan, a risk register and a decision log, unblocked weekly | Systems Engineering part 9, Big-company FE |
| levelling up | two engineers you review and sponsor, a team practice you introduced (eval gates, readiness reviews) | AI-native, SRE part 11 |
applied to you
The manager reviews already show the levelling-up pillar (reviews across five teams, documentation, GDPR across platforms) and name over-engineering as the thing to watch. The gap the book points at is the big-picture pillar: written direction that other teams adopt. That is the artifact to produce next.
THE STAFF ENGINEER'S PATH
Tanya Reilly, 2022: big-picture thinking, project execution and levelling up others
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Three pillars
The three pillars: staff engineers think about the big picture (direction, strategy, how systems and teams fit together), execute large projects across teams, and make the engineers around them better. The balance shifts by role and by week, but a staff engineer who does only one pillar is missing the job.