I’ve been mulling over this one for months now so I thought I’d try and tap into the HN hive-mind.

I’m a senior backend SWE at Wolt (so not FAANG-size but sizeable, I think our product team consists of about 600 peeps though the figure increased dramatically since I joined 14mos ago) and I’m slowly moving to a staff-engineer role cause after 8yrs in the industry it felt like it was time to transition to a more abstract role and new set of challenges.

As staff+ roles (borrowing terminology from the StaffEng book [0]) are generally ill-defined in our industry and heavily dependent on the org, part of the process requires that I compose a list of what I perceive or would want my responsibilities to be in this new role as a preliminary setting of expectations.

I’ve read the book [0] and listened to the podcast [1] and been ruminating about this topic for a few months now but I worry that any definition I compile will be heavily biased by my experience thus far and not account for the nuances and changes that come with the transition.

So this is a question to the SWE peeps in the crowd that have already made or are in the process of making the transition to technical leadership. What do you see your responsibilities as a staff+ engineer being? What do you consider the right ratios between coding, mentoring/coaching/sponsoring, establishing best-practices, liaising between teams, translating strategy to engineering initiatives, etc, to be? What do you wish you had considered/known before making the transition?

[0]: https://staffeng.com/book [1]: https://podcast.staffeng.com/