Hiring Staff Engineers
What to look for when hiring senior technical leaders.
• 1 min read
Staff engineers are force multipliers. But hiring them is different from hiring senior engineers.
They need to have built the thing you’re about to build. Not something similar. The actual thing. If you’re scaling to 10M users, find someone who’s already done it. The lessons can’t be learned from books.
Look for written communication. Staff engineers spend more time writing design docs than code. If they can’t explain complex technical decisions in writing, they can’t scale their impact.
Check for battle scars. Ask about their biggest production incident. The best staff engineers have war stories and learned from them.
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