There is a starter piece from April on this topic - with many great people and references: We kept stumbling across the career pathway of Staff Quality Engineer, and when polled, 63% of you weren’t aware of its existence. So we did a bit of exploration.
The career trajectory for QA as I have known through years: (Bottom to top)
Intern QA
Associate QA
QA
Senior QA
QA Lead
QA Manager
Principle QA
Head of QA Department.
I have heard about this role, but never came across any person with this title until now.
If the organizations would hire someone like Staff Quality Engineer: I believe someone with vast expertise in software industry standards & ISO 5055, help in making software company achieved that level.
The influence this person might have of course earning tenders/bids - authority of accepting or rejecting certain client proposals.
Someone who holds an authority and can easily share trail of dos/dont’s within “Quality perspective” with higher authorities internally and externally.
I believe also a person responsible for ‘QA Standard Audits’ by external parties whether QA process is in compliance with legal standards and responsible for due diligence.
As they say: With great power comes great responsibility!
Interesting use of military terms in testing roles.
We really only have senior testers these days often due to the model where testers are generally solo on a project so they need to do all the leadership type things associated with staff level.
One key difference I suspect is I would normally associate staff term with a level of people management and generally a lot of testing models have moved completely away from testers having people leadership responsibilities.
Interesting perspective, thank you for adding Andrew.
What I have seen so fra from the Staff Engineer descriptions was a high-level individual not in the management hierarchy. But I can see where the point is coming from, thank you for bringing it up.
To me, the important part is to recognize that there is a shift in the role on the higher IC levels - what ever we label them.
Thanks for sharing that article, Jesper and I’ll definitely keep an eye out for your book!
So it sounds like you get more involved in the business side of things if you’re part of the bidding process for new work? Is it just the Staff-level testers that get involved in that at your org?
From what I understand, A Staff Engineer is still seen as an Individual Contributor but a very high-level one so they might not get involved in people management.
Like you said, they tend to hold a lot of authority and have more ability to influence the business, as well as their colleagues.
This is actually true as when you’re at that level, I assume there are loads of expectations placed on you by your colleagues and the business.
One interesting thing I heard at the event I attended is that it’s not uncommon for people to reach the Staff level and then ask to step down a level as they find it too overwhelming.
I basically act across the whole organisation, rather than in a specific team, as a consultant to support quality thinking. That basically means:
Supporting people with their questions as they have them
Looking for and spotting places to improve quality
Running training about testing
Getting that quality culture going
Monitoring the overall organisational quality culture
I work as an IC, meaning I don’t manage anyone (like a Head of) would do and report directly to the CTO. My influence is across the organisation at all levels, from C-Suite down to junior team members where I bring them all on a journey for quality.
Happy to answer any specific questions that you have
So my company only has one quality practitioner: me. That means the trajectory means “be Callum”. However my role fits into a wider discussion of influence at different engineering levels.
Principal engineer: Sets the structure of architecture and direction of software development across the whole company.
Staff engineer: Specialists (Quality / Security / Data Science) that influence strategy in their domain across the whole organisation. Same influence as a principal, just that they have more of a focused specialism.
Tech Lead: Works in a project to influence the direction of project development.
Senior engineer: Works in a project to influence the direction of story development.
Engineer: Influences their own work.
The reason I’m a Staff engineer and not something else like a Quality Architect is just because my CTO wanted to align levels across all types of engineer
Fun Fact: You can call yourself whatever you want title wise. I would say it’s your boss that sets the titles that we use though and something like Staff / Principal engineer speaks to a tester that works at a large engineering org. If the Staff+ roles align to your career and what you want from your next roles then go for it, in my experience calling yourself Staff+ will mean people assume:
You can influence at an org and C-Suite level
You work without any direction and with a lot of uncertainty
You can confidently mentor and coach senior engineers
You work within an engineering team of devs
You have a holistic view of quality that spans into code & architectural quality
You can read/write code
You understand software development practices and can influence them
I would second. I also believe to inculcate the quality mindset or influence about Quality - title does not or should not matter, you can hold any title to talk about Quality. Its great to see this mindset and Quality beyond titles!
. Thank you for reminding me to get back to it, it has been stalled for a while.
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