I think a Staff Developer isn’t just someone who can crank out more features or work longer hours; it’s a role about leadership, influence, and technical excellence beyond your own individual output. Drawing inspiration from Will Larson’s StaffEng guides and stories here, and from my own experience, here are the key qualities that separate good Staff Developers from great ones—and what I believe companies and individuals should look for and cultivate. Their code-writing skills are important, but it’s their broader impact that truly defines them.

A Quick reminder, a Staff Developer is sometimes called a Staff Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer, or Principal Engineer. Titles vary widely between companies, but the role is generally similar. In the past, this role would have been called a Tech Lead, but that term has become overloaded and is now often used to refer to a role that combines both technical and people leadership (Technical Team Lead). So, for this article, when I am referring to Staff Developer, I am referring to the technical leadership role that is not a people leader.

The Role: What Sets Staff Apart

Let’s start by clarifying what a Staff Developer does that differentiates them from other senior developers:

• A senior individual contributor track: influences architecture, strategy, and technical direction rather than just writing code.
• Often a bridge between engineering and other stakeholders: product, operations, leadership.
• Helps maintain technical quality across multiple teams or systems, not just one team’s own.
• Mentors, elevates others, and helps shape the culture of engineering.

While this may seem like a lot, they are not expected to do all of this to the same degree. A great Staff Developer will often specialize in a few of these areas, while still being competent in the others.

Key Qualities of Great Staff Developers

1. Strategic Thinking & Systems View: Must see many layers at once — not only the immediate feature or code, but the system architecture, long-term maintainability, performance, scaling, reliability, and how it connects to product goals.

2. Influence Without Authority: Staff Developers often do not have any direct reports and are instead embedded into various teams. They need to influence and lead through expertise, relationships, and persuasion rather than formal authority. Communication, both written and verbal, is important.

3. Technical Leadership & Quality Stewardship: Staff Developers define standards, enforce good engineering practices, perform code reviews with a broader context in mind, and ensure robustness, maintainability, and scalability across the codebase, frequently through POCs and prototypes.

4. Communication & Mentorship: They communicate clearly across multiple audiences, from engineers to product managers to executives. They mentor and teach, helping others grow. They build documentation, share learnings, and create patterns and practices.

5. Adaptability & Continuous Growth: As systems grow, company priorities shift, and technology advances, Staff Developers need to continuously adapt both their skills and mindset. They stay humble, they seek feedback, and they adjust their approach when needed.

6. Empathy & Long‐Term Thinking: Like with “Great developers”, empathy is crucial here. Empathy for users, for other teams and for maintainers of their code long-term. They need to weigh the long-term consequences and costs of their decisions for things like maintainability, ownership and scalability.

I often find that #3 and #6 are where the highest values come from a great Staff Developer. They are able to elevate the entire engineering org through their drive while still ensuring that the other developers have a say in what is happening. #2 is also very important and frequently the hardest for developers to learn; it enables very important discussions with executives and enables the Staff Developer to “fight” for the right technical decisions.

Conclusion

Great Staff Developers possess a unique mix of technical expertise, strategic vision, and interpersonal skills that enable them to have an impact on the organization far beyond what their individual contributions would suggest. They are leaders, mentors, and stewards of the codebase and the engineering culture. If you are a developer who wants to make the jump to Staff, focus on cultivating these qualities, especially those that go beyond just writing code. If you are hiring for Staff Developers, look for these traits in your candidates; the best Staff Developers will need to have a lot more than strong coding skills.