The Staff Engineer's Interface

Staff engineering is not management with the people parts stripped out. It is an interface to the technical future of a group that already has managers. If you try to do their job, you will do it badly and they will be right to resent you. If you refuse to touch the org at all, you will become a very expensive ticket-taker.

The work is to make the next six months cheaper than the last six, in decisions, not in heroics. That means writing the document that lets two teams stop arguing, naming the constraint nobody wanted to name, and occasionally sitting in a meeting you hate because the architecture will be decided there whether you attend or not.