So what? In our research into quality engineering, 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.

Why it matters. It's often a pathway for other tech roles, so we believe it should also be considered as a pathway for quality engineers. By becoming more aware of it's existence we can advocate for the role if we feel the right opportunity arises to do so.

A blueprint. It turns out there isn't one set way of looking at Staff Engineering roles. Many companies don't have them at all. Also, there is an overlap with a Principal Tester role. We've included a link to explore a talk from Jitesh on that too.

Have you heard of the job title “Staff Quality Engineer”?

533 of you voted, 63% said no and 37% said yes.

Community Commentary

When we conversed with the community on the topic, this is how they described the Staff Quality Engineering role:

It's about technical leadership and influence | Stuart Thomas

Compared to a Senior, a Staff level role demonstrates broader technical leadership and influence across the organisation along with a greater understanding and ability to influence quality strategy. They innovate, finding opportunities to improve tools, processes, and ways of working that contribute towards achieving broad quality and technology goals.

Stuart then expands on his observations: 

What I've seen is Staff is equivalent to a Head of, and Principal is Equivalent to Director of, with the only role in tech above Director of being the CTO. This applies to the Quality Engineering pathway in addition to all tech roles.

If you're look for a fun phrase, try “Big Kahuna” | Paul Coles

They're the big kahuna. They set the leadership, strategy, the frameworks, the craft used to assess quality. — Paul Coles

It's a pivotal leadership role | AJ Wilson

In my experience, a Staff Quality Engineer plays a pivotal role in delivering and enabling high-quality, innovative technology solutions to clients/stakeholders internally or externally. It can be team/tribe/product or domain level depending on the need/skill set. They lead and mentor teams and individual contributors, ensuring that quality is integrated throughout the software development lifecycle. Their responsibilities include, but is not limited to developing and implementing quality management plans or initiatives, learning and 'testing tool belts', conducting assessments and audits where needed, supporting cost saving, empowering people and collaborating based on risk and value needed. Smart Development with Software Teaming regardless if that is TDD, TBD OR BDD. There is so much that can be covered.

This role requires a deep understanding of quality standards, strong problem-solving skills, and the ability to communicate effectively across various departments/domains and skill sets.

Not saying “it depends” or “context’ as that is lazy `imo`, but there are lots of variances and nuances.  — AJ Wilson

Staff Engineers involves the ability to look at the system | Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Staff engineers are usually the level where you start to work organisationally. Effecting wider cultural change and deep diving into technical problems. — Callum Akehurst-Ryan

Zoom in and zoom out | Tara Nelson

Another systems thinking perspective, zooming in and out and looking at the bigger picture:

Typically Staff Quality Engineers have a range of strategic planning, technical leadership, soft-skills and influence that stretches across teams throughout the organization.

What comes about from distributed teams all trying to implement CI/CD in their own way, with their own tools, with varying skills, experience and visions?

Sometimes it's seen as a good thing - in small organizations, maybe it drives innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. When you have distributed teams working on a shared system, you end up with teams stepping on one another's toes, which results in an unreliable ci/cd pipeline that routinely fails, which may or may not be immediately apparent because there's nobody to tell all of the teams to have monitoring and alerting in test environments, too. This slows down development, which slows down testing, which means missed release targets.

Enter the Staff Quality Engineer to conduct some RCA, look at pipeline logs, understand bottlenecks- audit tests, spot redundancies and inefficiencies, basically, understand the problem in both a zoomed in and zoomed out view to suggest stabilizing tests, improving pipeline efficiency, enhancing observability, and improving testing Infrastructure. — Tara Nelson

The paths split at the senior level | Jesper Ottosen

Jesper shares an image from StaffEng where staff engineering and more traditional management pathways can split.

The path varies for each company. Back in 2020 Jitesh did a talk on his role as a Principal Tester at the BBC. As the image above also indicates, there are overlapping aspects with a Staff Quality Engineer role and that of a Principal Tester. It depends on the context, as we love to say in the testing world.

Explore further:

• Have you heard of the job title "Staff Quality Engineer"? | LinkedIn Poll
• What does your career path look like at your company? | The Club
• What Is a Principal Tester? — Jitesh Gosai | Talk
• Staff-Level Testing Roles — Career Paths for High-level Testing Roles — Jesper Ottosen | Book
• The StaffEng