Staff engineers influence multiple teams aligning efforts with department goals.
Transition to staff engineer role prioritizes enabling team success through feedback analysis.
Deep dives
The Role of a Staff Engineer
As a senior staff engineer at Wayfair, Ben Edmonds works on the platform team, supporting over 1,200 engineers within the company. His focus is on building tools and systems to enhance efficiency and productivity for engineers.
Influencing Teams as a Staff Engineer
Staff engineers like Ben are expected to influence multiple teams within their department, aligning their efforts with the department's goals. As they progress to more senior roles like principal engineer, their scope of influence expands to impact the entire company.
Transitioning from Individual Focus to Staff Engineering
Moving from a more individual contributor role to a staff engineer involves resetting expectations of productivity. Staff engineers prioritize helping others become more efficient and achieve their goals, shifting focus from personal output to enabling team success.
Importance of Feedback in Staff Engineering
Ben emphasizes the significance of collecting and analyzing feedback to drive improvements in tools and processes. By identifying patterns in feedback, staff engineers can prioritize projects, enhance communication skills, and guide teams towards achieving organizational goals.
During today’s conversation, we speak with Ben Edmunds, Senior Staff Engineer at Wayfair. You’ll hear all about his role at Wayfair, from his day-to-day active projects and how he goes about setting OKRs to the legacy and new deploy tooling he uses, and the method he has adopted to guide engineers. Ben shares ample advice for young engineers and stresses the value of learning more than one coding language. He reveals the finer details of life at Wayfair and the tools he uses to make sure that goals are reached, which include surveys, direct conversation, and partnership. We talk about the role of auxiliary engineering, the templates engineers build for application in partnership with an engineering team, and Ben points listeners in the direction of topics they should research, depending on whether they are looking to improve their software engineering or technical leadership skills. We hope you join us for an action-packed episode today!
