Bio: Accomplished engineering leader with over 16 years of experience designing, building and operating mission-critical software solutions on the cloud. Expert in technical and organizational - scalability, reliability and efficiency.

Loves vim, i3wm, linux, dwarf fortress and cataclysm dda.

L8 Conf talks

Driving Change and Making an Impact as Staff Engineer

In this talk, I’ll share practical strategies drawn from over 16 years of experience on how to make a real impact as a Senior Individual Contributor often referred to as a Staff or Principal Engineer.

These roles were created to empower Individual Contributors by giving them a mandate to operate across teams and departments, providing a unique opportunity to operate on higher scope and influence multiple teams, departements or even whole organisation.

While this influence and power is often a dream come true for engineers, it also brings significant responsibility.

Many newly promoted Staff Engineers struggle to identify the right areas or problems to focus on, which can lead to frustration or inefficient use of the authority entrusted to them. Another challenge is effective change management, a skill rarely taught—especially within engineering circles.

I will share my experience, examples and tools on how to be more effective as a Staff Engineer."