Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Understanding the difference between staff engineer, principal engineer, and distinguished engineer can be confusing.
The career trajectory of an individual contributor (IC) is less established than the path for engineering managers, with tech companies approaching titles differently.
The same role can come with a wide variety of titles depending on the organization, making it hard to identify patterns around job scope, skills, and experience. It can, therefore, be really tricky to know the differences between staff engineers, principal engineers, and distinguished engineers.
To find out what IC leaders have in common, LeadDev spoke to a group of engineers and asked them to describe their roles and responsibilities.
