Recommends

• Book
  Staff Engineer ↗Will Larson

  The clearest thing written on what Staff+ actually means day-to-day.

• Book
  The Staff Engineer's Path ↗Tanya Reilly

  Practical and grounded. Less theory than Larson, more about navigating real orgs.

• Book
  Designing Data-Intensive Applications ↗Martin Kleppmann

  Makes platform engineering feel like systems design, not YAML wrangling. Read it even if you don't work on databases.

• Resource
  Site Reliability Engineering ↗Google

  Useful for thinking about reliability as an engineering discipline, not a dashboard collection. Free online.

• Book
  Team Topologies ↗Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

  Most platform problems are team-boundary problems pretending to be tooling problems.

• Book
  Team Topologies ↗Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

  Most platform problems are team-boundary problems pretending to be tooling problems.

• Resource
  Google SRE Books ↗Google

  Useful for thinking about reliability as an engineering discipline. The Workbook is practical; the original is foundational.

• Resource
  Kubernetes Documentation ↗

  Still the source of truth when blog posts start hallucinating YAML.

• Book
  Platform Engineering ↗Camille Fournier and Ian Nowland

  Practical guide to building developer-centric infrastructure. Treats platforms as products.

• Book
  Designing Data-Intensive Applications ↗Martin Kleppmann

  Makes platform engineering feel less like YAML wrangling and more like systems design.

• Resource
  Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit ↗Mikito Takada

  Short, clear, and still useful. Free online.

• Resource
  Jepsen Analyses ↗Kyle Kingsbury

  A healthy reminder that systems lie under pressure. Read before trusting any database vendor marketing.

• Spec
  OAuth 2.0 RFC 6749 ↗

  Painful but necessary if you work near authentication. The spec is clearer than most blog posts about it.

• Spec
  OpenID Connect Core ↗

  Read alongside OAuth. Understand the difference before you build on top of it.

• Resource
  SPIFFE and SPIRE Documentation ↗

  Useful mental model for workload identity. The concepts transfer even if you use a different implementation.

• Resource
  NIST Zero Trust Architecture (SP 800-207) ↗

  Useful when kept concrete. Skip the vendor versions — this is the authoritative source.

• Resource
  Anthropic Documentation ↗

  Tool use, prompt caching, and the model card. Best provider docs for understanding what the model actually does.

• Resource
  OpenAI Evals ↗

  Useful starting point for evaluation patterns. The concept matters more than the framework.

• Resource
  Building LLM-powered applications ↗Eugene Yan

  Grounded survey of patterns that actually hold in production. No hype.

• Book
  Staff Engineer ↗Will Larson

  Interviews with real Staff engineers. Demystifies archetypes and career paths.

• Book
  The Staff Engineer's Path ↗Tanya Reilly

  More practical than theoretical. Good for navigating influence without authority.

• Book
  An Elegant Puzzle ↗Will Larson

  Systems thinking applied to engineering organisations. Useful whether you manage or not.

• Book
  The Engineering Executive's Primer ↗Will Larson

  A level up from Staff. Worth reading before the conversation about scope happens.

The Staff+ job is not "senior engineer, but with more meetings." It is technical judgement at organisational scale.

• Reference
  Adopting Kubernetes because everyone else did

  It's the right choice for multi-tenant platforms with many teams. It's expensive overhead for a small product with one team.

• Reference
  Building an internal developer platform before understanding the teams

  Platform engineering is a service business. Build for the teams you have, not the teams you imagine.

• Reference
  Adding AI agents to workflows without evals and access boundaries

  A tool-using agent with no guardrails is a bet that nothing will go wrong.

• Reference
  Treating observability as dashboards

  Dashboards are for showing executives that something is fine. Observability is for debugging when it isn't.

• Reference
  Copying FAANG engineering practices

  Useful to understand. Dangerous to copy without FAANG-shaped problems, FAANG-sized teams, and FAANG-level investment.