Meta Staff Engineer: What the Best Engineers Do Differently

Meta Staff Engineer Sajal Rustagi reveals what Staff Engineers do that most don't and what the best engineers do differently to reach the top. While foundational behaviors like proactivity and ownership still separate growing engineers from stuck ones, leveling up today requires a completely new set of staff skills built around agents.In this video, we cover:The behavioral shift from IC4 and IC5 (Senior) to IC6 (Staff Engineer) at MetaHow top engineers treat on-call firefighting as a system-wide ownership opportunityWhy rotating between Engineering Manager (EM) and Staff IC sharpens your business and technical influenceTransitioning from Developer Experience (DX) to Agent Experience (AX) using MCP, Claude, and markdown contextThis conversation is for software engineers, senior ICs, and tech leads who want to learn the new staff skills required to multiply their impact and get promoted now.This episode was recorded at TechLead Conference, a conference for engineering leaders on adopting AI.Timestamps:00:00:00 - The New Staff Engineer Skills00:00:44 - 2 Behaviors That Separate Mediocre and Staff Engineers00:02:16 - How the Best Engineers Build an Ownership Mindset00:04:26 - What Staff Engineers Do Differently During On-Call00:06:26 - Senior vs. Staff Engineer: Expanding Your Sphere of Influence00:09:56 - Why Switching Between Manager and Staff IC Builds Better Engineers00:14:04 - Why Unblocking Engineers Now Means Unblocking Agents00:16:41 - Managing Multi-Agent Handoffs Without Losing Control00:19:02 - Shifting from Developer Experience to Agent Experience00:21:47 - Why the Empty Engineering Backlog Is Still a Myth00:25:03 - How to Build Custom Agent Workflows and Reusable Skills00:28:31 - The #1 New Skill Software Engineers Must Build Today00:31:10 - How Meta Engineering Culture Compares to StartupsGuest - Sajal Rustagi, Staff Engineer at Meta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sajalrustagi#StaffEngineer #SoftwareEngineering #EngineeringLeadership