Where should you grow after reaching Senior Software Engineer?
Career tracks, Staff+ levels, growth process, and self-development
Slide contents
1. Where should you grow after reaching Senior Software Engineer?
Career tracks, Staff+ levels, growth process, and self-development
2. Alexander Polomodov
Technical Director & Fellow, T-Technologies
Led Tinkoff digital ecosystems engineering
Owned architecture topics across the company
Owned our System Design Interview
Interviewed technical managers and SREs
3. Five questions after reaching Senior
From the career fork to concrete development practice
SDE career paths after Senior
Staff+ levels and IC archetypes
Tinkoff engineering growth process
A general self-development approach
Growing an engineer toward Staff+
4. 01. After Senior, the ladder becomes a fork
Staff+ and Engineering Management scale impact differently
5. Two tracks begin after Senior
Leadership is a transition, not a separate grade
6. Staff+ matters under two conditions
Wanting a longer career ladder is not enough
The company already has such engineers
The company actually needs such engineers
7. 02. Staff+ is defined by sustained impact
The matrix, levels, and archetypes describe different dimensions of work
8. Growth appears across five axes
Scope, Impact, Complexity, Leadership, and Improvement
9. Level grows with the scale of impact
From a hard project to a unique company advantage
10. Staff+ spans different kinds of work
Tech Lead, Solver, Architect, and Right Hand
11. A Staff+ role can emerge bottom-up
Start with a real organizational need
Hard problem exists — take it as Senior
No request — formalize problem and solution
Nothing found or bought — change companies
12. 03. Growth is a closed evidence loop
Matrix, next-level tasks, review, and feedback
13. Eight steps close with feedback
Every step has an explicit owner
14. 04. Self-development starts with the problem type
Complex work offers fewer ready-made recipes
15. Complex has no ready-made recipe
Probe → sense → respond instead of best practice
16. Theorists reduce uncertainty first
Complex Problem becomes Complicated Problem
17. Practitioners begin with action and observation
A mature loop brings RFC and Plan back
18. The right work lives outside urgency
Do First · Schedule · Delegate · To /dev/null
19. Growth lives in important, non-urgent work
Goal → plan → focus on steps → enjoy results
20. Build the plan backwards from the goal
The standard approach boxes thinking inside today's situation
21. 05. An engineer grows along three axes
Design it, build it, debug it in production
22. Design, implement, and investigate incidents
System Design + Java + Troubleshooting
23. After Senior, choose how to create impact
The career track follows the work, not the other way around
Two career tracks diverge after Senior
Staff+ requires demand and proven impact
Growth runs through matrix and review
Complex problems connect theory with practice
Engineers develop three connected skills
Choose the work and mode of influence; the level records the result.
24. Materials for further study
Links that appeared in the talk
Talk materials: t.me/book_cube/1013
SRE Book and SRE Workbook — Google
Staff Engineer — Will Larson
Cynefin framework
25. Thank you!
polomodov.tech
Slides, links, and materials are in the Telegram channel
Alexander Polomodov, Technical Director & Fellow, T-Technologies
@book_cube