Staff Engineer Archetypes

The four common archetypes of Staff-plus role

Tech Lead:

The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a particular team. They partner closely with a single manager, but sometimes they partner with two or three managers within a focused 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.

• comfortable scoping complex tasks
• coordinating their team towards solving them
• maintain many of the essential cross-team and cross-functional relationships
• close partner to the team’s product manager

an organization needs roughly one Tech Lead for every eight engineers, making it far more common than other archetypes.

Architect:

The Architect is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area. They combine in-depth knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization level leadership.

Architects are responsible for the success of a specific technical domain within their company, for example, the company’s API design, front-end stack, storage strategy, or cloud infrastructure.

The Architect role tends to evolve in relatively large companies, companies with exceptionally complex or coupled codebases, and companies that are struggling to repay the technical debt they created in their initial sprint to product-market fit

Some companies push for Architects to remain deep in the codebase, and others set a clear expectation that Architects must not write code

Solver:

The Solver digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. Some focus on a given area for long periods. Others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership.

the Solver generally operates on problems that are already identified as organizational priorities and thus are called on to do relatively little org-level chiropractics.

they generally stop working on problems once they’re contained

Right Hand

The Right Hand extends an executive’s attention, borrowing their scope and authority to operate particularly complex organizations. They provide additional leadership bandwidth to leaders of large-scale organizations.

Architect and Right Hand roles have generally emerged as the organizations reached one hundred and one thousand engineers, respectively