From Individual Contributor to Modern Architect: Redefining the Staff Engineer's Career Growth

The typical (mis)conception in today’s software market is that there are two ways to grow as a developer: to become a manager or an “out-of-team-staff-engineer.” While the manager’s path is challenging, the IC’s path is uncharted territory in our industry. What makes a good IC?

The typical (mis)conception in today’s software market is there are two ways to grow as a developer: become a manager or become an “out-of-team-staff-engineer” (or any other made-up title for a senior Individual Contributor your company has chosen). While the manager’s path is challenging, the IC’s path is uncharted territory in our industry. This lack of knowledge has led to many failed promotions and frustrations from staff engineers and the teams they collaborate with. What should a staff engineer be doing? What makes a good IC?

As agile continues to spread and autonomous cross-functional teams rise, the staff engineer role must adapt to remain valuable to the organization. No longer can they create an architecture plan for the teams to execute or perform all the software optimization single-handedly. The good news is there is much room for growth in these new environments, as they pose many new challenges, such as aligning different teams on shared goals, maintaining shared platform quality, and collaborating on cross-domain projects. However, the job and skills required are very different from the traditional architect role. In this session, we will discuss what “modern architects” should be doing, what skills they should possess, and how they can remain impactful in an environment that empowers team autonomy and ownership. We will also cover alternative ways to grow and be impactful as an IC while remaining a part of a team.

In this session, you will learn: - What makes an excellent individual contributor in an agile world - Different types of individual contributors - How can we increase our “blast radius” from within a team - When & how to enable IC growth in your organization

Being an engineering manager for most of my career, this is a topic I am constantly giving a lot of thought into. I am passionate about improving how we enable ICs in our industry, and I would love to share this passion with the community!