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What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

 
Bobi
Bobi
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Jun 14 * 2 min read
 

In my last story "Junior vs. Senior vs. Staff Engineer", I uncovered
the responsibilities for Junior-to-Staff level engineer. But they are
not the complete picture of a SWE's career ladder, and the top-notch
tier is still missing, aka "Principal Engineer". In companies like
Facebook, Amazon, or Google, it maps to Level 7+ and its total
compensation is around $800k a year.

In this blog, I will share my observations of "what does a principal
engineer look like".

[1]
From Levels.fyi

Definition

In general, a principal engineer should be able to spot, drive and
deliver an initiative with multi-team, organization-level impact.

To expand on that, a successful principal engineer can constantly
demonstrate following capabilities:

  * Identify opportunities that are business-critical and with
    org-to-company level impact.
  * Identify key success metrics and only focus on components on a
    critical path.
  * Abstract common issues from the products and fix the common
    infrastructure proactively.
  * Constantly influence the org's engineering culture.
  * Help to recruit senior engineer and managers
  * Assess the new products or technologies in the industry

Archetypes

From my observations, companies usually pair a principal engineer
with an archetype to better support and guide a principal engineers'
growth.

 1. Generalist: An established leader in a product/service area.
    Constantly deliver and land sizable impact.
 2. Specialist: Considered as an expert in a specific domain.
    Continuously contribute to the improvement in his/her field.
 3. Coding Machine: Build solutions to complex problems and does much
    faster than most engineers.
 4. Product Manager(PM) Hybrid: Solve a complex business problem that
    requires XFN communication, product strategy, and technical
    solution.

In Short

To achieve the "org-level" impact, principal engineers need to be
very selective on what to work on and use as much leverage as they
can. For example, to set them up for success and maximize their
influence, a principal engineer usually directly reports to a
"director-level" engineering leader.

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Bobi

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Written by

Bobi

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TechLead @FaceBook

Dev Genius

Dev Genius

 
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