Subject: Three signals you need a Staff Engineer now
Hey there,
A CTO I advise was in every design review, every architecture discussion, and every cross-team coordination meeting. They hadn't written production code in four months. Decisions queued behind them for days. Senior engineers were frustrated ... they wanted more technical leadership and a visible growth path. The CTO wanted to work on strategy but couldn't escape the tactical.
They didn't need another senior engineer. They needed their first Staff Engineer.
This Week's Decision
The Situation: You're a CTO at 20-30 engineers. You're the bottleneck for every significant technical decision. Architecture quality varies across teams because nobody else owns the big picture. Your best senior engineers are asking about their career path, and "more of the same" isn't a satisfying answer.
The Insight: Three signals tell you it's time. If two or more are true, you're already late.
Signal 1: CTO is the bottleneck. When every architecture decision waits for one person, you've created a single point of failure in your engineering organization. The CTO should set technical direction, not approve every database schema change. If your calendar is 60%+ meetings about implementation decisions, you need someone else making those calls.
Signal 2: Inconsistent architecture across teams. Team A uses PostgreSQL with Row-Level Security. Team B rolled their own tenant filtering at the application layer. Team C hasn't thought about multi-tenancy at all. Without a Staff Engineer establishing and enforcing technical standards, each team optimizes locally and the system accumulates inconsistency that compounds into integration cost.
Signal 3: No IC career path above Senior. Your best senior engineers see two options: become a manager (they don't want to) or leave for a company with a Staff track (they will). The Staff role retains your strongest technical contributors by giving them scope, influence, and compensation parity with management ... without managing people.
What Staff is not: a Senior who's been around the longest. Staff Engineers own cross-team technical outcomes. They identify architectural debt, propose solutions with org-wide impact, and build consensus across teams without positional authority. The job is 30% hands-on coding and 70% technical leadership, documentation, and influence.
Compensation reality: $250-350K total compensation for a strong Staff Engineer in 2026. That's significant. But the cost of the CTO being a bottleneck ... delayed decisions, lost senior engineers, inconsistent architecture ... is higher. One client estimated their CTO bottleneck cost $400K/year in delayed features and attrition.
The first 90 days should be structured:
- Days 1-30: Listen. Attend design reviews, read ADRs, map the technical landscape. No changes. Build context and trust.
- Days 31-60: One cross-cutting win. Identify a technical problem that affects multiple teams and solve it. Shared library, common authentication pattern, unified monitoring setup. Ship something visible.
- Days 61-90: First ADR. Write an Architecture Decision Record that sets a precedent for how the organization makes technical choices. This establishes the Staff Engineer as a decision-maker, not just a contributor.
The CTO I mentioned hired a Staff Engineer in March. By June, the CTO was spending 60% of their time on strategy, product architecture, and external partnerships. Design reviews happened without them. That's the outcome you're buying.
When to Apply This:
- 20+ engineers where the CTO can't allocate time for deep technical work
- Architecture inconsistency across 3+ teams with no owner for cross-team standards
- Senior engineer retention risk due to lack of IC career progression
Worth Your Time
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Will Larson: Staff Engineer ... The definitive resource on Staff+ engineering roles. The archetypes (Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, Right Hand) help you define what kind of Staff Engineer your organization needs first.
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Gergely Orosz: Compensation Benchmarks ... The "trimodal" compensation model explains why Staff Engineer pay varies from $180K to $450K. Understanding which tier your company operates in prevents either overpaying or losing candidates to unrealistic offers.
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Tanya Reilly: Being Glue ... The work Staff Engineers do ... connecting teams, noticing gaps, driving alignment ... often looks like "glue work." Tanya's talk explains why this work is critical and how to make it visible and valued. Essential reading before writing the job description.
Tool of the Week
Engineering Levels ... Curated collection of engineering career frameworks from companies like Spotify, Etsy, and Buffer. Use these as starting points for defining your own Staff Engineer level ... including scope, skills, and expectations. Don't invent from scratch when proven templates exist.
That's it for this week.
Hit reply if you're feeling the CTO bottleneck. Tell me your team size and the decision types that queue behind you ... I'll help you scope the Staff Engineer role. I read every response.
– Alex
P.S. For the complete engineering leadership framework ... from first hire to scaling past 50 engineers: Engineering Leadership: Founder to CTO.