Follow-Up: What this year has been like as a newly-minted "Staff" engineer
About 8 months ago, I made this post about my worries in getting a promotion above senior at a large non-tech company.
I got some great advice, and I thought there might be value in talking about my experience in the 8-ish months since then, and maybe extend an invite to the other senior+ folks here to talk about how 2026 is going for them.
A lot has changed since I wrote that post. I'll try to keep it more focused than just stream of consciousness.
A little bit of background about me to ground this post:
- I work in ML - I have a background in CS (two degrees) and became an MLE just long enough before LLMs hit the scene to really appreciate what we had after being an SDE for about a year.
- I am squarely on the edge between early and mid-career. I will have 5 total YOE in January.
The Technical
- Starting with what I think is an ice cold take: I am sick of doing AI work. I enjoy MLOPs and the intersection data science and software engineering. AI, mostly, is not that. There is a lot of AI discussion on this forum and in general, so I won't spend much more time on it, but I find AI projects repetitive and uninteresting. LLM-wrappers, Agents/Agent-harnesses, and RAG/knowledge source work for AI is uninteresting to me, but that is what my enterprise is focused on, and what is driving my team's earning numbers this year
- I find the lack of technical mentorship challenging. I am used to having more talented and senior peers to bounce ideas off of or force me outside of my own head. Leading 8 engineers and bringing leadership to my peer staffs has been an adjustment for me. I am struggling with this more than I would like to admit
- I love the amount of autonomy I am given in making decisions. I am empowered to decide on our tech stack, allocate our tech budget, and attend conferences (I got to attend, and was mostly underwhelmed by, the annual Databricks conference). Guiding our infrastructure maturity and seeing the DevEx experience on my team improve is probably one of the most rewarding parts of my career
- I am expected to have technical opinions on things I don't care about. My boss (director) and skip-level (VP) pull me into conversations where I'm the technical voice of reason in the room, and I have to talk to a lot of vendors trying to sell us stuff. I am not only expected to have opinions off the cuff, I am also expected to answer confidently in areas I'm not always well-versed in.
The Organizational
- My team re-orged several times since January. Most were small, a few were not. I voluntarily surrendered my platform ownership to focus on my product team, and the number of products I now own has ballooned to over 5. My team is spread thin, and I suspect is going to be getting thinner as we shed some contractors. I do okay with ambiguity, and my mid-year review went exceptionally well, but I'm hoping the remainder of the year is more stable.
- My biggest impact has come from standards and process-creation. Probably no surprise to the more senior, and not entirely a surprise to me, but I am sad I don't get to get in the weeds as much as I would like.
- Delegating is really hard for me especially when I know the person I'm delegating to won't do as well as I could. I'm really focused on coaching my seniors, and this has been a big challenge for me.
- Having good relationships across teams has saved me. Being able to work around bureaucracy because I know other staff/lead engineers has allowed me to keep my team's velocity mostly healthy.
- My juniors are completely addicted to Claude. Last AI-related note, we have claude, and it's been a massive headache for the number of times a junior has told me they made a decision without understanding why. This is probably the strongest headwind I'm trying to fight.
Overall, this year is going better than I hoped. I hope some seniors who were where I was can see this, and realize that making the jump can definitely be rewarding and doable even if you are unsure of yourself or about taking that next step.
EDIT: As some pointed out, it wasn't super clear why I made this post. My point in this post is to check in about how my year is going, and to see what's relatable and what's not. I'm curious to hear about other's experiences