Tech Leads often carry the team's context and maintain many of the essential cross-team and cross-functional relationships necessary for the team's success. They're comfortable scoping complex tasks, coordinating their team towards solving them, and unblocking them along the way. Tech Leads are the most common Staff archetype and lead one team or a cluster of teams in their approach and execution. Stories featuring Tech Lead archetype: Diana Pojar, Dan Na, Ritu Vincent Admittedly, some folks are easier to classify than others. This taxonomy is more focused on being useful than complete, but so far, I've been able to fit every Staff-plus engineer I've spoken to into one of these categories. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations. The Right Hand extends an executive's attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations.Others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership. Some focus on a given area for long periods. The Solver digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward.They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership. The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area.Some companies also have a Tech Lead Manager role, which is similar to the Tech Lead archetype but exists on the engineering manager ladder and includes people management responsibilities. They partner closely with a single manager, but sometimes they partner with two or three managers within a focused area. The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a particular team.
The four common archetypes of Staff-plus roles I encountered are: In literature, recurring character patterns are called archetypes, such as the "hero" or the "trickster,"Īnd the archetype term is helpful for labeling these frequent variants of Staff-plus engineers. Most companies emphasized one or two of the patterns, and one pattern only existed in companies with many hundreds or thousands of engineers.Ī few companies didn't feature any technical leadership pattern and pushed all their experienced engineers towards engineering management. The better their experiences began to cluster into four distinct patterns. The more folks I spoke with about the role of Staff-plus engineers at their company, This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders often paper over several distinct roles hidden behind a single moniker. Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineersĮveryone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people.
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