What does a Principal Software Engineer do?

In my last story “Junior vs. Senior vs. Staff Engineer”, I uncovered the responsibilities for Junior-to-Staff level engineer. But they are not the complete picture of a SWE’s career ladder, and the top-notch tier is still missing, aka “Principal Engineer”. In companies like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, it maps to Level 7+ and its total compensation is around $800k a year.

In this blog, I will share my observations of “what does a principal engineer look like”.