Staff+ engineering is fundamentally different from senior engineering. You're no longer optimizing for individual contribution — you're architecting systems that scale to billions of users, mentoring other engineers across the org, and making technology choices that ripple through the entire company for years.
Staff Engineer gives you that practice. Our AI coach challenges you with realistic infrastructure problems — from diagnosing why database costs are exploding to designing system evolution as scale increases — and gives you structured feedback on your architectural reasoning, tradeoff analysis, and impact quantification.
How it works
- Practice Staff+ architecture cases modeled on real interview questions from Google, Netflix, Stripe, and Uber
- Get AI-powered feedback on your systems thinking, consistency model decisions, and operational tradeoff analysis
- Build skills across scalability, reliability, cost optimization, and technical leadership
- Track your progress across 20+ systems architecture competencies with adaptive difficulty
Why Staff engineer interviews need dedicated prep
Staff engineer interviews test whether you think about problems at the right level of abstraction — not "how do I code this?" but "how does this decision affect our ops cost, latency SLO, and team velocity?" Generic system design prep doesn't cover the full scope: consistency model selection, cost-per-transaction reasoning, or how to navigate architectural evolution as scale changes.
Our AI doesn't accept hand-wavy architectural answers. It pushes you to quantify your tradeoffs, explain why you chose strong consistency over eventual when the business can tolerate eventual, and think through how every architectural choice compounds as you scale to 10x, 100x, or 1000x your current load.
Built for aspiring Staff engineers
Whether you're targeting Staff Engineer or Principal Engineer roles at Google, Meta, Netflix, or Stripe, transitioning from senior engineering to Staff level, or preparing for Staff+ roles at smaller companies, Staff Engineer helps you build the architectural systems thinking and impact articulation that define Staff+ interviews.