How We Operate Together

The Staff Engineer role can feel isolating. You carry broad context and are expected to show clear judgment and consistent influence, but you don’t have positional authority to make those things land on their own. You’ll regularly find yourself in rooms with Directors and VPs where you need to lead through influence rather than rank. The structures below exist to make that less lonely and more effective.

These are not optional participation opportunities. They are part of how the role functions.

Local Staff Groups

We organize local staff groups — smaller clusters of Staff Engineers organized around shared organizational layers, product domains, or active working groups. Local groups are where most of the real work happens: shared context, peer review, architectural alignment within a domain, and honest conversations that are harder to have in larger settings.

Your local group is not just a meeting. It is the team of peers you should be thinking about. Bring your hard problems to it early — before you have the answer. Use it to pressure-test your architectural thinking, surface risks you might be carrying alone, and stay aware of what others in adjacent domains are working on.

One thing local groups are not: a place to reinforce existing silos. The goal is tighter coordination within a domain, not isolation from the rest of engineering. When a decision made in your local group has implications for others, it should surface to the right forums.

The Monthly Global Staff Meeting

Once a month, the full Staff Engineer community meets. This is the forum for decisions and discussions that span domains, for organizational updates that everyone needs to understand in the same way, and for building the shared context that makes working across teams possible.

Come prepared. The global meeting is not a status update you passively receive — it is a conversation you actively participate in. Bring the signal from your local group. Surface the things your team is seeing that others might not know about. Ask the questions you think others are too polite to ask.

After the meeting, your job is not done. The value of that organizational context only materializes if it reaches the engineers who need it. Close the loop with your team.

Architecture Office Hours

The Architecture Office holds weekly office hours open to any engineer, Staff Engineer, or Engineering Manager who needs architectural guidance. When someone books an appointment, we put the call out to all Staff Engineers to join the conversation. In some cases, we assign specific people based on the domain or requirements involved.

When you’re facing a hard architectural decision, whether it’s a new system design, a cross-cutting concern, or an approach that touches other teams, office hours are where you bring it.

Do not wait until you have a finished proposal. The right time to engage is early, when there is still room to change direction. A rough sketch and a clear question is far more valuable than a polished design that you’re already committed to.

Engaging with Architecture Office Hours is also a signal to your team. It models the behavior we want to see broadly: seeking review, inviting challenge, treating alignment as part of the work rather than a formality at the end.

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