Staff Engineer

Overall

As a Staff Engineer, you have a strategic impact on a combination of areas that could include a large team, a very deep technical problem, and/or a long term. The problems that you’re solving are open-ended.

Responsibilities

You provide considerable high-level technical guidance across your team, anticipating and planning for technical problems. You're highly knowledgeable in major parts of our technology stack and are the technical owner of significant components of our code base. You have a sustained track record of creating improvements in business-critical systems around stability, performance, and scalability.

At this stage, you’re still acting in a very hands-on role, and as such, you’re a prolific contributor to both Glossier’s core projects, as well as side and experimental work. When presented with a complex problem, process, or existing system, you’re able to reduce the complexity in order to maximize efficiencies. You provide guidance, direction and help colleagues build and produce better outcomes.

You and Your Team

You have strong abilities to influence without requiring reporting authority. You facilitate cross-team work and are influential beyond your individual squad. You're capable of driving groups with disparate interests to decisions with clear communication and follow through. You’re capable of setting a short to medium-term strategic direction for aspects of the technology stack, identifying areas of critical need based on future growth and developing roadmaps to attack these problems.

Growth

As a Staff Engineer, you may act as the leader of a technical team, but are probably not acting as the people manager of fellow engineers. In order to move on to Principal Engineer, it is expected that you are operating in more of a leadership role, and are active across multiple squads or technologies.

Example Skills and Behaviors

Knowledge

• Identifies complex and high-churn areas of the codebase, and systematically works to improve them
• Stays up to date with technology trends, and applies a critical lens to assess whether they’d be beneficial for Glossier
• Improves Glossier’s performance, reliability, and scale

Communication

• Facilitates healthy discussions across the Engineering team

Execution / Delivering Goals

• Exercises skills in order to contribute to the development of company objectives to achieve goals
• Applies company goals and strategy to resolve complex and atypical problems in creative, effective ways
• Proactively identifies issues and proposes solutions with corresponding context/data

Discretion / Supervision

• Acts independently to determine methods on new projects/assignments
• Scopes work on complex projects involving multiple engineers, and ensures the team’s delivery
• Sought after as a coach and leader – mentors the mentors