What Being a Staff Developer Means at Shopify (2023)

Talk to 10 people and they might share 10 different definitions for staff developer. This is not too surprising, because the whole concept is relatively new. Programming as an industry is quite young, say about 80 years old, but even then we've had managers since the beginning. However, the concept of a staff developer as a career step is at most 25 years old. This is a concept where an individual contributor can have the same scope of impact and seniority as a manager.