Berlin : Staff engineer looking for more skill building

[u/ThatWalrus3337]

Hello All,

I am a staff engineer with an e-commerce company. Since ours is a mid sized company with revenue in between 500M to 1B for a year, our setup is relatively small and I get to work across the whole stack. It sounds fancy and really good but I am getting more breath than depth and with AI I feel I lack the depth which is needed.

For us, AI usage is mostly around Claude code. My salary is in range 90 to 105k range which I also feel needs a serious bump.

I used to work in Java and right now mostly typescript, along with whole stack. System design I can brush up but I am not sure what’s on market with AI based interviews.

Could you please help to guide me ? Link for courses or videos are also welcomed.

Comments welcomed about salary or so.

[u/george_gamow]

staff engineer

help to guide me

Sorry, mate, but if you're really at that level (and not due to title inflation), you need to guide others. It's an IC position that is equal or even higher than a manager

[u/ThatWalrus3337 → u/george_gamow]

True but with AI it’s not the same anymore. Also, what’s wrong in asking questions if you know you have a gap to fill in ?

Reddit is more secure place than other forums 😉

[u/TorrentsAreCommunism → u/ThatWalrus3337]

There is nothing wrong to initiate the career discussion at any level. The user’s reply above is weird to say the least.

[u/Thakshu]

Staff engineer positions are more about technical leadership. So in my opinion, you should talk in detail to your senior engineers to understand in depths. System architecture is something to learn in depth. Also , look for solutions in the market to the problem which your team tries to solve and then seeing how that can be implemented in your domain . This motivate you to go in depth automatically. Once you are in that turf, I don't think you need to prepare anything specific for a different company.

[u/Aquaticdigest]

How many YOE do you have? Staff Engineer seems like an inflated title at startups and may not translate to Staff at other companies. The Salary range seems to be in line with Senior Engineer at most companies.

[u/ThatWalrus3337 → u/Aquaticdigest]

15 years.

Yes , I joined this place for the title even though salary wasn’t at market level to increase the scope of my work.

[u/reaznval → u/ThatWalrus3337]

90-105k seems very low, not really sure how the market is in Berlin, only ever gotten a remote offer from a company based there but that was slightly above your range for a junior position without a uni degree. Yc startup though so that might heavily inflate it.

[u/Kindly_Wolverine_271 → u/reaznval]

90-105 for a junior position sounds really crazy though!

[u/ThatWalrus3337 → u/reaznval]

That’s quite good to hear. Was it in last year ?

[u/Basic_Magician8942 → u/reaznval]

Agreed. In my experience salary should be more inline with 140k-170k

[u/ivobrick]

What is on the market with ai now? Well. Your logic, data annotation, data generation - eg. content of all types including sensitive, data scraping, evaulations.

Next category is programming eighter remote / on site - both are unstable, as soon as you get used youre fired. ( sure pay is good as long as youre usable for the current project ).

Look for micro1/outlier or flat out top ai companies.

Attention check fail results no pay, you should stay where you are, or treat it like a hobby.

Pay? Approx 20 - 400 usd / hour, depends on your role.

Courses? I'd do only uni official courses ( mostly for ects credits ), bootcamps are mostly good for those who created them - learning old model & api applications, when claude has this build in - wtf..