L1
Honest Take — Before You Begin
Companion to SOFTWAREARCHITECTUREMASTERYCURRICULUM.md Honest reflections, no sugar coating.
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Course · 7 lessons
~43 hr
Advanced
Staff-Level Architecture Leadership
Staff-Level Architecture Leadership covers: The Software Engineer's Guidebook, The Staff Engineer's Path, Staff Engineer, Software Engineering at Google. Operate at the staff engineer level — leading technical direction, making architectural decisions that outlast your tenure, mentoring engineers, navigating organizational dynamics, and building the bridge between engineering and business. Sustained open-source work — releases, external contributors, multi-version compatibility — IS staff-level work: architectural decisions (API design, backward compatibility, deprecation strategy), documentation, reviewing external contributions, maintaining a public codebase. Operating a platform whose failures carry real business cost IS staff-level scope. This module gives you the language and framework to articulate what you already do, and to do it more intentionally in your next role.
reading · we frame, you read MIT or the canonical
taught · we author, no canonical fits
↺ spirals back to earlier lessons
Course locked
Complete Evolutionary Architecture & Decision-Making first.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
L2
The Software Engineer's Guidebook: The Career Ladder, Mapped Honestly
There are a thousand books about how to build software and almost none about how software careers actually work. Who decides what "staff engineer" means at your company? Why did a…
primary
StaffEng.com
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L3
The Staff Engineer's Path: Three Pillars and the Work Nobody Was Counting
Think about the last week you spent mostly not coding: coordinating two teams that were about to build the same thing twice, writing the design doc nobody else would write, unbloc…
primary
StaffEng.com
locked
L4
Staff Engineer: Four Shapes of the Same Title
Here's a trap that catches excellent engineers every year: they interview for five "staff engineer" roles, get one, and discover six months in that the job is nothing like they im…
primary
StaffEng.com
locked
L5
Software Engineering at Google: Programming Integrated Over Time
Google's engineering advantage is not brilliant algorithms. It is boring infrastructure taken deadly seriously: code review that scales to tens of thousands of engineers, tests tr…
primary
StaffEng.com
locked
L6
Module Checklist
Work through each item before the checkpoint.
locked
L7
Project: The Staff-Level Document Set
Staff-level influence travels through documents. Write the three that carry the most weight — a technical vision, an architecture decision record, and a cross-team tech spec — for…
locked
7 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.