Role Profile: Staff Engineer

Historically, once individual contributors reach a certain level in the organization, they have one route to promotion: management. However, some senior technical employees have skills and experience that the organization wants to preserve but have no interest in managing a team. Rather than rewarding highly technical people by turning them into average managers, organizations have created a second career track, parallel to management, which takes advantage of the valuable technical and business expertise that these employees have acquired. This report details the skills, background, and responsibilities for the first role on that track, the staff engineer.