What's a Principal? A Conversation With my Head of Eng.

#career #beginners #productivity #softwaredevelopment

The other day, I sat down for coffee with my Head of Engineering ☕.

After some conversation, I asked:

– "So, what does it really mean to be a Principal Engineer?"

He paused, thought for a moment, and replied:

– "For me, it's all about the sphere of influence."

Before unpacking this, let me share some context about my current company, so we’re all on the same page regarding terms.

My current company is the textbook definition of a MegaCorp — an empire sprawling across industries and continents. Sure, tech is a big part, but... we also make films and TV series? 🎥 🤷‍♂️

Now, let’s zoom-in the lens and focus just on the programming-related branch.

For the rest of this post, our world is the programming division: from upper management (CEO, CTO, C{i}O...) to Heads of Engineering (let’s simplify this group to “Managers” shall we?) and the dev teams.

Each dev team has a lead (tech lead) and N engineers. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about QA, product, or infra teams —> every team follows this same pattern.

Visually we have something like this:

The engineers —us— are split into tiers: junior, mid, senior, or principal.

And there are two career paths: the management path would look something like:

junior -> mid -> lead -> senior Lead -> Head of Eng. & managers.

While the Contributor path (the dev path if you may) would look like:

junior -> mid -> senior -> principal.

Shorter path. Simpler path.

Where were we?

Ah, yes — I was having a coffee with my Head of Engineering.

The Sphere of Influence.

Junior Engineers have the most focused area of influence. Their main task? Face their current User Story or Bug. It’s not about seeing the big picture yet; it’s about executing the task well and learn.

Mid Engineers begin to expand their focus. they might influence across the code base, whether that’s a single repository or a collection. They can see how User Stories interconnect.

Senior Engineers. This is where things zoom out further. A Senior Engineer impacts not just the codebase but the entire project. Including QA, Design, Product... They enable the entire team to deliver better results.

"And What about Principals?"
*He reclines in his chair, clearly enjoying the buildup as we finally arrive.

Principal Engineers they influence the entire area of engineering. An area is made up of several projects, each with its own teams.
Their role is to raise the bar for all of these projects. With an eagle-eye view, they identify opportunities for improvement and elevate every single one of those teams.

Their Impact ins't confined.