Introduction
Discover key skills needed to advance to Staff+ engineering by understanding scalable system design, managing trade-offs, documenting design decisions, and integrating AI effectively. This lesson prepares you to become a reliable engineering leader beyond just coding.
We'll cover the following...
John doesn’t get paid Staff+ money for cranking out code. He earns it by designing systems that scale, handling trade-offs well, and leaving a clear trail of why things were built the way they were.
The problem is that he never shares that trail, so the company treats him like a walking single point of failure.
You don’t want to be that kind of indispensable. You want to be the engineer who builds scalable systems and improves the team, especially as AI keeps changing how we work.
We’ll break down what that looks like by covering these topics:
Reading the room
Goldilocks design
ADR document patterns
AI System Design
Interviewing like Staff+
If you’re new to System Design, this module covers some more advanced topics; but we’ve got a roadmap for you in the next section to help you catch up.