> First, the definion for the most of those positions looks Senior Engineers with a few more years of experience: so you are limited to the scope of a single te

> First, the definion for the most of those positions looks Senior Engineers with a few more years of experience: so you are limited to the scope of a single team scope, report to an Engineering manager, just be a worker at a feature conveyor, just be faster, mentor young workers, maybe get some devops skill. In my experience, this isn't what I've seen staff engineers doing. The expectations you laid out at the top are much more in line with what I've seen staff engineers doing. The staff engineer's I've known are basically the technical version of a VP or a director. They're often not focused on individual features, but rather new products or large scale architectural changes. The mentoring they do is often mentoring strong developers into future leaders at the company. The staff engineers at my current company are currently focused on how to integrate multiple products where each product has three to four teams of engineers working on it. At a previous company, I can remember them being focused on whether we stay with on-prem hosting or move to the cloud. I'm not sure where you're interviewing, but to me it sounds like they may not be big enough to need what I would consider a staff engineer, but they just have seniors that they wanted to promote.