Staff / Principal Engineer

The Staff Engineer and Principal Engineer roles are senior technical-expertise levels — beyond Senior and Lead — that let an engineer keep growing without going into management.

A Staff Engineer has cross-team or cross-product influence, drives structural architecture choices, mentors other engineers and bridges the gap between tech and business. The Principal Engineer extends that influence to an entire organisation, or even to an industry.

The individual contributor tracks at Google, Meta, Stripe, Shopify and GitLab have popularised these titles in France, where they remain a minority but are growing fast — particularly in tech scale-ups.