From Junior to Staff Engineer: Scaling beyond a single team

The day-to-day life of a Staff Engineer

A self-described mix of the Architect and Right Hand staff engineer archetypes, Paulina’s daily work involves designing scalable system architecture, mentoring other engineers, helping teams untangle complex technical challenges, and setting the Trust & Safety domain’s technology vision to ensure our platforms are future-proof.

To put it simply, think of a sports team. If the Director of Engineering is the General Manager, who is responsible for building the team and setting the overall strategy, the Staff Engineer is more like the Head Coach. They focus on the playbook, technical design, and how everyone actually plays together, working alongside the Lead Engineer, who is like the team captain.

Some weeks are heavily focused on deep-dive technical design, while others are almost entirely dominated by organisational alignment. Paulina’s impact comes less from writing code herself and more from empowering others – stepping in only when technical guidance is needed. What matters most is that our teams are set up for success and pulling in the same direction.

Another important focus is balancing rapid delivery with long-term architectural integrity. While AI coding assistants have accelerated software development, reviewing code for quality, maintainability, and architectural alignment remains a deeply human, cognitively demanding task. Tied to this is the challenge of finding the right level of involvement. As a Staff Engineer, you are a technical authority, but you must avoid micromanaging every decision, or you’ll create a bottleneck and stifle team growth. The real art is learning how to step back and trust teams to make their own choices, while having the intuition to know exactly when to step in and guide them on critical issues. 

Career growth through experimentation

Paulina’s career progression at Vinted hasn’t always been linear. She has experimented with different roles and projects, guided by the realisation that the real "north star" of a career isn’t gained by climbing the career ladder, but by finding the best fit for where you are in life.

She explored the people management pathway when she was a Backend Engineer, and became an Engineering Manager for our Engineering Academy participants. But it was while she was covering for a Staff Engineer during their holiday that she realised the technical leadership pathway was a better fit for her skills, passions, and long-term aspirations:  

Some Backend Engineers at Vinted choose to go down a specialist path and work on highly-specific, technical challenges. Others, like Paulina, decide to focus on a more holistic view of how our different systems and platforms intertwine – working across teams to solve company-wide problems. Becoming a Staff Engineer wasn’t a dramatic turning point, but a natural progression for someone who felt drawn to engineering projects that lived outside her team’s scope.

"I wanted to solve systemic issues – things that technically weren't my "direct responsibility" but still caused friction and pain points for us at the end of the day."

The biggest shift for Paulina came from the transition from Lead Backend Engineer to Staff Engineer, when all of a sudden, she didn't have a single home team anymore. This meant losing the familiar structure of daily standups, sprint planning, and the typical agile or scrum ceremonies. Without the immediate dopamine hit of closing Jira tasks or shipping features, it can be harder to recognise your immediate impact. Day-to-day coding gets delegated, and other engineers lead specific projects. Paulina discovered that her new role was about multiplying impact through others rather than driving the execution herself.

Tips for career progression

Having gone from Junior Backend Engineer to Staff Engineer in just 6 years, we asked Paulina if she worked on any skills or formed any habits that helped her progress to senior levels. For her, it’s all about "proactive ownership" of both your own career and your team’s success. In practice, this came down to four "rules" she started following early on:

1. Be strategic and proactive with your growth. Don't wait until the end of the quarter to think about your impact. Focus on tasks that align with the path you want to pursue – not just when it's time to write your self-evaluation.

2. Your team’s success is your success. Don’t chase individual projects at the cost of your team. If your team fails, any individual "star" work doesn't matter. Real seniority is about making sure the whole ship succeeds.

3. Keep a record of your work. Not everyone will remember every smart design decision, helpful comment, or project milestone you achieved. Keep a running list of your accomplishments and invest real effort into branding yourself during quarterly and yearly reviews.

4. Apply common sense over checklists. Look at what your team actually needs right now and tackle those blockers – whether that means calling out a risky timeline, sharing feedback, or raising your hand to ask for help when a task is slipping.
This mentality has also helped Paulina approach promotions. Rather than aggressive negotiations, which don’t come naturally to her, she broaches the topic through transparency – while always aligning her expectations with organisational restraints and business realities.