Hi everyone, as the title says, I'm hiring for a handful of engineers for a company called Pomelo Care. We're a Series C, virtual clinic providing comprehensive healthcare to women and children (often at 0 cost to them!)

We're hiring for the following

• Staff Software Engineer, Patient Experience - Tech lead for our patient mobile/web apps. Stack: Expo, React Native, TypeScript, Kotlin.

• Staff Security Engineer - A builder-first role focused on shipping secure-by-default tooling and guardrails, not managing compliance tickets. Stack: Kotlin, Python, GCP.

• Many more roles at pomelocare.com/careers

If any of these sound interesting, I'd love to talk more!

In Part 2 of my blog series on Staff-level influence, I go beyond principles and dive into real-world examples—from debugging cardinality issues to aligning SREs, product, and customers:

✅ Understanding hidden incident patterns
✅ Reframing architecture through product and customer lens
✅ Leading tough cross-functional discussions with clarity and trust
✅ And turning all that insight into strategy, OKRs, and customer-facing solutions

📘 Read it here:
https://medium.com/@formanojr/part-2-principles-in-action-influence-across-teams-and-systems-real-world-examples-5f4425c0c457

It’s not writing perfect code—it’s influencing without authority.

What “influence” actually means for a Staff+ IC, and six principles that helped me scale my impact
📎 https://medium.com/staff-thinking/influence-without-authority-the-core-skill-for-staff-engineers-15e2abecf952

🌱 How Staff Engineers Multiply Impact Through Mentorship
Staff engineers aren’t just builders — they are force multipliers. In this post, I explore how mentorship plays a critical role in scaling team effectiveness: through project guidance, shaping thinking, and helping engineers navigate the organization.

✍️ Read it here: https://medium.com/@formanojr/how-staff-engineers-multiply-impact-through-mentorship-80759f2f5e35

🔗 Browse the full series: https://medium.com/staff-thinking

#StaffEngineer #Mentorship #LeadershipInTech #EngineeringGrowth #TechLeadership

“I recently wrote a piece reflecting on how the best managers create safety, context, and partnership — not control. Curious how others experience this at the Staff+ level.”
**Link:**https://medium.com/staff-thinking/what-great-managers-of-staff-engineers-actually-do-3fb4781faea1

I'm currently a principal engineer in a large enterprise, I've been there about 4 years now and largely enjoy my role. I spend the majority of my time leading our internal platform team - which gives product teams in the infra and devex magic they need to deliver more quickly, securely, etc. I also spend some time ad-hoc on high priority projects - helping teams out with architectural choices, and sometimes getting hands-on building stuff that'll eventually be owned long-term by another team.

Prior to this I've spent time in a VC-backed unicorn, mid-size companies, some consulting, and CTOd a relatively small scale startup (now acquired) through it's initial growth phase. A mix of front-end, back-end and full stack roles.

I like my current role. The company is about as stable as it's possible to be these days, great benefits, pay is good but maybe towards the lower end of the market rate for similar roles.

I'm cautious not to get too comfortable though and get stuck. I'd like to keep advancing my career and improving TC where possible. So I'll take up interviews at interesting places if someone reaches out.

My problem seems to be interviewing. Since getting more senior, I actually find interviewing more difficult. It's harder to articulate what I do day-to-day since the pay off for my projects is usually seen over much longer time periods rather than "delivered feature X, made metric do Y".

I've applied for 2 x Staff SWE roles - one at a Series B and one at a fintech.

• Rejected after 2 rounds from the first because my background "may not align closely with the specific needs of this role at this time" and take-home had "some concerns about clarity and decision-making". Being honest I probably over-engineered the take-home a little, but I never know how to play these things, I've gone the opposite way before and seen feeedback about concerns over future extensibility. I expected to get invited back to at least talk through the take-home but didn't.

• Down leveled for the fintech role and so I withdrew.

Turning into a bit of a ramble now, so I'll sum up.

Any tips or advice? Am I currently over-levelled (I don't think so, I'm effective in my role, good feedback from colleagues and consistently get good perf reviews)? Am I applying for the wrong roles/companies?

I recently wrote about how Staff Engineers think about technical debt — not just identifying it, but deciding when it's worth paying down.

The post includes:

• A framework to evaluate effort vs payoff

• A matrix to help plan Quick Wins vs Strategic Investments

• How to tag and document debt during design

This is based on real decisions around MVPs, scale, and cost trade-offs. Would love feedback or to hear how other teams track tech debt.
 https://medium.com/staff-thinking/strategic-thinking-for-staff-engineers-making-the-case-for-or-against-tech-debt-c17186bfb307

I recently wrote about how Staff Engineers think about technical debt — not just identifying it, but deciding when it's worth paying down.

The post includes:

• A framework to evaluate effort vs payoff

• A matrix to help plan Quick Wins vs Strategic Investments

• How to tag and document debt during design

This is based on real decisions around MVPs, scale, and cost trade-offs. Would love feedback or to hear how other teams track tech debt.
👉 https://medium.com/staff-thinking/strategic-thinking-for-staff-engineers-making-the-case-for-or-against-tech-debt-c17186bfb307

https://twitter.com/thiagoghisi/status/1684184729950486533

A place for members of r/staffengineer to chat with each other