The path to Principal Engineer at most companies often feels poorly defined, and that’s because it is. This is a problem. It’s also an opportunity. Inventing the Principal Engineer at your workplace is a collaborative effort including both management and your senior-most engineers, and we believe this invention is made by engineers who can solve the sorts of problems that often stump organizations entirely.
In this talk we’ll discuss how to work on the highly ambiguous problems that generally characterize these roles, how defining the role itself is a highly ambiguous problem, and our experience defining the Principal Engineer role at Carta.
Speaker
![](https://qconsf.com/sites/qcon_sf/files/styles/medium/public/pictures/2023-07/willlarson.jpeg?itok=Nl8FZybW)
Will Larson
CTO @Carta, Author of "An Elegant Puzzle", "Staff Engineer", and "The Engineering Executive's Primer", Previously at @Calm, @Stripe, and @Uber
Will Larson is CTO at Carta, and has been a software engineering leader at Calm, Stripe, and Uber. He is the author of An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, and The Engineering Executive's Primer. Before moving to San Francisco, he grew up in North Carolina, and studied Computer Science at Centre College in Kentucky.
Find Will Larson at:
Speaker
![](https://qconsf.com/sites/qcon_sf/files/styles/medium/public/pictures/2024-07/dan.png?itok=5ALCoaWs)
Dan Fike
Deputy to the CTO @Carta, Previously @Google and @YaHoo, 5+ Years Implementing Strategies and Solutions in the Tech Industry
Dan Fike is a Principal Engineer and Deputy to the CTO at Carta, Inc. His experience ranges from game development to web app infrastructure, from Google to a 5-person tech startup, from programmer to architect, and from writing patents to conducting M&A diligence. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois