We also have Principal Engineer and Fellow roles after that, although I don’t think we have anyone at the fellow level. I started off as a Software Engineer (or SWE), moved through Senior Software Engineer (Sr SWE), (a brief stint through management) then Staff and now Senior Staff. I’m currently a Sr Staff Software Engineer, but what exactly does that mean? While the exact titles and role dividing lines I use here are specific to Box (although we modeled them on Google), the general shape of advancement is largely similar across the industry. As it happens, that’s still more or less the trajectory that I’m on, but now I have a much better idea of what it means to be a senior member of the technical track.

It was mostly just my ambition and desire to advance that was picking that role. However, I actually had no real idea what an architect did. I wasn’t particularly interested in management and I also knew that architects were some of the most senior people on the technical track. I’m going to be perfectly honest here, when I first got into software, if you had asked me what job I wanted in 10–15 years, I would have told you I wanted to be a software architect. The same is also true on the technical track, but to a much lower extent, resulting in a bit of mystery around those roles. Part of this is because the more senior roles in the management track have a high amount of visibility both internally and externally. Now I’ve always understood, at least at a high level, what a manager does and what the management track entails. At the same time, almost every career talk or panel that I’ve ever attended is by someone from the management track. Almost every software company that I’ve ever talked to has both a technical track and a management track meaning that if you stay on the technical track, you can advance to equally senior levels without managing people.

Google principal software engineer