Staff / Principal Engineer

Staff and Principal engineers are senior individual contributors. They lead big technical initiatives without managing people directly — designing the architecture for a major rewrite, mentoring a dozen engineers, weighing in on hard trade-offs across teams. The 'glue' that makes a 100-person eng org actually coherent.

Writing a design doc, reviewing PRs across multiple teams, mentoring a senior engineer, and weighing in on a thorny architecture debate.