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Staff Engineer

· One min read
📚 Book
Carlos Angulo Mascarell
Carlos Angulo Mascarell
Senior Platform Engineer
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📚 Here are my notes about the book Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson

Staff engineer archetypes​

  1. Tech Lead: He guides the approach and execution of a team. It tends to be the first staff engineer experience.
  2. Architect: He is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a specific area.
  3. Solver: He jumps into problems, finds solutions, and jumps into the next one. He is a trusted agent of the organization.
  4. Right hand: He extends an executive's attention.

Which is right for you?

Start by listing the kinds of work that energize you. Next, match it with the archetypes and roles available in your company.

What do Staff engineers actually do?​

  1. Setting technical direction
  2. Mentorship and sponsorship
  3. Providing engineering perspective
  4. Exploration
  5. Being Glue: Have you been in meetings aligning frontend and backend developers? You were the glue then.
  6. But will you still write software?
  7. Slow but rewarding

About me​

I'm a Senior Platform Engineer. I build and evolve Internal Developer Platforms — golden paths, self-service tooling, and paved roads spanning AWS governance, CI/CD standardization, and developer enablement — so engineering teams ship faster, safer, and more autonomously, with less cognitive load. My core stack is AWS, Terraform, and GitHub Actions, and I'm an AWS Certified Solutions Architect. I care deeply about paved roads, productivity, and documenting implementations so knowledge scales with the team (yes, I'm an engineer who likes to document 🧑‍💻).

You can check my experience here.

Personal Blog - cangulo.github.io GitHub - Carlos Angulo Mascarell - cangulo
LinkedIn - Carlos Angulo Mascarell

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