I have two Staff+ level positions open on my team. The expectation for them is to be able to work in a cloud-native (AWS/K8s/Terraform/etc), distributed systems (Kafka/SNS/SQS/Kinesis) that is mission critical because it touches people's money (fintech). And new client code gets written in modern stacks (Swift/SwiftUI, Kotlin/Compose, Typescript/React/Next.js).

If I were still an IC rather than a talking head on Zoom all-day, my role would map to somewhere between Senior Staff and Principal. I would write microservices from scratch, deploy to the cloud, operate them, and then write all of the clients (iOS/Android/Web) myself. I've been doing this for ~20 years so I have the ability to quickly pick up new languages, frameworks, platforms, technologies, etc.

The current Senior Staff/Principal engineers do projects like decomposing that old miscellaneous database from the original monolithic codebase and implement it across all domains with correct boundaries. Build libraries that all engineers on the team use. Ship V1 of that new product that is very strategically important to the company.

(Send me an email if you are a Staff+ engineer that is looking for something new!)