Subject: The 3 signals you need a Staff Engineer
Hey there,
A CTO called me last month after their third failed Staff Engineer hire. Each candidate was technically brilliant. Each left within 6 months. The problem wasn't the candidates ... it was the job description. They hired for deep technical expertise when they needed someone who could align 4 teams around a platform migration.
The Staff Engineer role is the most misunderstood title in engineering.
This Week's Decision
The Situation: Your company is at $3-8M ARR with 15-30 engineers across 3-5 teams. Technical decisions are getting made in silos. Architecture is diverging. You're hearing "we need a Staff Engineer" from multiple directions.
The Insight: Three signals tell you it's time:
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Cross-team technical decisions stall for weeks. Teams can't agree on shared patterns, and no one has the authority or context to break ties. You, the CTO, are the bottleneck for every architectural question.
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Your best senior engineers are solving the same problems differently across teams. Three teams, three caching strategies, three deployment patterns. Not because the problems are different, but because nobody owns the horizontal view.
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You're spending more than 30% of your time on technical decisions instead of organizational strategy. A Staff Engineer takes the technical decision load so you can focus on hiring, process, and business alignment.
The interview process that works: skip the algorithmic coding challenge entirely. Use these instead:
The Architecture Review Exercise: Give candidates a real (anonymized) system from your codebase. Ask them to identify the top 3 risks and propose a migration path. You're evaluating communication clarity and trade-off reasoning, not whether they pick the "right" architecture.
The Cross-Team Influence Question: "Tell me about a time you changed a technical direction across multiple teams that initially disagreed with you." Listen for: stakeholder mapping, coalition building, written proposals, and measured outcomes. If they can only describe solo technical achievements, they're a Senior Engineer, not a Staff Engineer.
Reference Checks That Matter: Ask former managers: "Did this person make other engineers more effective, or were they a solo contributor with a senior title?" The answer separates Staff Engineers from Senior Engineers who got promoted for tenure.
2026 compensation benchmarks for Staff Engineers at Series A-C SaaS companies: $220-320K base + $80-200K equity (4-year vest). Remote roles trend 10-15% lower. The market has cooled from 2024 peaks but Staff-level talent remains competitive.
When to Apply This:
- Companies with 15+ engineers where technical coordination problems are visible
- CTOs spending more than 30% of time on architectural decisions
- Organizations where cross-team projects consistently miss deadlines due to integration issues
Worth Your Time
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Will Larson: Staff Engineer ... The definitive resource on Staff Engineering archetypes. Larson identifies four types: Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, and Right Hand. Knowing which archetype you need prevents the "brilliant but wrong fit" hire that keeps happening.
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Tanya Reilly: Being Glue ... The work that Staff Engineers do ... documentation, alignment, mentoring ... is often invisible. Reilly's talk explains why this "glue work" is the actual job, and why organizations that don't value it can't retain Staff Engineers.
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Gergely Orosz: Compensation Trends ... Orosz publishes the most reliable compensation data for senior IC roles. His 2026 surveys show Staff Engineer comp stabilizing after 2 years of compression. Essential reading before setting your offer range.
Tool of the Week
Ashby ... An ATS built for engineering hiring. The structured interview scorecards and calibration features prevent the "gut feel" hiring that leads to Staff Engineer mis-hires. I've seen teams using Ashby's interview analytics identify which interview stages actually predict job performance ... for most, the architecture exercise correlates 3x higher than coding challenges.
That's it for this week.
Hit reply if you're designing a Staff Engineer interview loop ... I'll review your evaluation criteria. I read every response.
– Alex
P.S. For the complete guide on building engineering leadership, from first hire to VP Engineering: Engineering Leadership: Founder to CTO.