On December 17th we wrapped up our final event of 2025 by kicking off our Behind the Title series. This series is designed to peel away the jargon and bring together experts who live and breathe their job functions and understand exactly what they do, as opposed to what a job description describes.
We started the series by focusing on one of techs notoriously difficult to fill positions: the Staff Engineer.
Hiring Staff Engineers is tricky, typically the person needs to combine technical judgment (architecture, systems thinking) with soft skills (stakeholder management, writing, cross-org persuasion).
Oftentimes the role is wrongly assumed as a “senior engineer x2”, yet its anything but, it’s a hybrid of problem framing, enabling others, and doing often invisible but high-impact work. Skills which are not the easiest to find in the candidate market, especially when the role is defined differently across so many orgs.
For this event, we invited 30 Staff+ leaders from product development companies across Europe. We are particularly grateful for those who joined us on our two quick fire panels representing the likes of Recharge, Talabat, Hubspot, Box, Back market and Vinted. Some remaining guests came from the likes of Google, Spotify, Eventbrite, Babbel, Duna, Skyscanner and many more top class European businesses.
You can sign up to our waitlist, here.
The staff engineer role is both demanding and ambiguous in its attempt to connect huge dots across systems, teams and people, yet when done well, it’s profoundly impactful.
Staff engineers succeed not by doing the most work, but by choosing the right problems, enabling others to solve them, and creating clarity where none exists.
Perhaps most importantly, this conversation reinforced how valuable community and peer learning are at this level. Staff engineers shouldn’t have to navigate this complexity alone.