🏆You only need 4 promotions: The step-by-step guide from Junior to Staff+ engineer
Stuck in your engineering career? Learn why coding more isn't the answer and how to grow your influence and impact to get promoted at every level.
We've all heard tales of the "10x engineer", a genius who out-produces entire teams. This is a powerful, but dangerously incomplete, myth.
In the real world, the engineers with the fastest, most sustainable growth are not solitary geniuses. The real 10x impact engineers are the ones who make their entire team, and eventually their organization, more effective.
Promotion isn't a reward for working hard. It’s a recognition that your scope of influence has grown. You are being trusted with a larger blast radius.
⭐ In this post, you'll learn
What "influence" actually means for an engineer
How to expand your scope of impact at each career level
Concrete strategies I’ve used to build visibility and influence across teams
🔍 What is "influence" for an engineer? (It's not office politics)
Influence is not about joining every meeting. That’s shallow visibility. Real influence as an engineer is about making others more effective through your technical decisions, your execution, and your communication.
I’ve seen firsthand how picking the right architecture expands influence. For example, I redesigned the API for a service by simplifying the routes, following REST principles, and coordinating with downstream teams to unblock their development with mocks. That technical decision about the API helped three teams move in parallel. Technical clarity creates leverage.
Execution matters too. If you're the one who jumps in while others sit on problems for days, you are strategically unblocking people. Influence is earned by showing you are the one who moves things forward.
The last piece is visibility. If people don’t know what you’re doing, it didn’t happen. I’ve made that mistake before. Now, I intentionally share tips about AI, send out updates of discussions with other teams, and use email and Slack to make progress public. It’s not bragging. It’s building trust.
🧰 The Junior Engineer
At the start, your job is simple: deliver consistent quality and learn fast. You build influence by being predictable in a good way. Your manager gives you a task and can forget about it. That’s how you earn more trust.
One of the biggest shifts early in my career was getting feedback about my communication. I got the feedback that I wasn’t keeping people in the loop. I thought if I reached the conclusion, then everyone else would have reached it earlier than I. But I was wrong. Now I have the habit of overcommunicating, and the perception has flipped.
You don’t need flashy results to stand out at this level. Just fix your bugs quickly. Learn from every code review, and share the learnings with your team. And prepare ahead of time your 1-to-1s so your manager doesn’t have to extract information out of you.
Also, don’t be afraid to ask questions. But make them good ones. Show that you thought about the problem and tried something. That alone builds more influence than most realize.
🧭 The Mid-Level Engineer
This is where the shift happens. You’re no longer just responsible for your work. You become responsible for your team shipping features. That means unblocking others and making yourself useful beyond your own tickets.
When one engineer was stuck on a persistent bug, I didn’t wait. I got involved, tested some things, and clarified the steps for him. That created more impact than any ticket I could have completed that week on my own.
You also start becoming the person others come to. When I share an AI tip, even something that feels basic, I’ve seen people who didn't know about it and feel grateful about it. That taught me to stop assuming others already know and start sharing more openly. It’s how you become the go-to person.
You don’t need to be the loudest voice. But you do need to be visible. Volunteer to present at demos. Fix the recurring issue no one wants to deal with. Help a junior get unstuck. That’s how mid-levels create their path toward the senior level.
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🧠 The Senior Engineer
At senior, you stop being measured by what you deliver by yourself. You’re judged by how many people can deliver because of you.
You start seeing how influence works across teams. When someone disagreed with some concerns I had, I realized I needed to involve some Senior engineers in the discussion. Not because they’re smarter, but because people listen to them. Influence is social. I learned to use it strategically.
And not all work is worth doing. I once joined a cross-org metrics meeting thinking it was important. It wasn’t. It had zero impact on priorities. Saying no to low-leverage work is part of senior judgment.
You write proposals involving other teams. You lead projects with ambiguity. You know when to escalate and when to mentor. And always be aware: Are the right people seeing the value you create, now that you mostly create it through others? Because if they’re not, it’s your fault, not theirs.
🚀 The Staff+ Engineer
Staff is a different game. You stop asking, “What should we build?” and start saying, “Here’s what needs to happen next.”
That starts with spotting undefined opportunities. I won a hackathon with an idea that wasn’t on anyone's roadmap. We built it, won, and I followed up with a Principal engineer who was interested in the project. This Principal engineer was thinking about force-multiplying the entire company.
Staff engineers also abstract complexity for others. They have to explain architectural tradeoffs to leaders who aren’t engineers. If they don’t get it, they won’t support it.
At this level, your job is to grow more Seniors. Coach them. Involve them in technical debates. And build processes that outlast your presence.
Influence as a Staff+ engineer is about scale. Both a junior and a Staff+ engineer have the same hours in the day, but they figure out how to influence the most people.
🎯 Conclusion
Your career doesn’t grow by accident. It grows when your influence expands—first over your tasks, then your team, then the entire org.
This playbook isn’t theoretical. These are the patterns I’ve used, and I see people use to make real progress. Earn credibility by influencing technical decisions, build trust through execution, and make sure the right people see it.
This is career currency that compounds. Start investing in it.
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🙏 One last thing before you go:
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See you in the next email,
Fran.
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Loved this breakdown, Fran.
One thing I’ve noticed is that people who make teammates feel safe to ask "dumb" questions or push back usually end up with way more influence than the ones who are always trying to sound the smartest.
Thanks for the shoutout!