> My expectations for the roles like Staff / Principal Engineer are that while staying hands-on, say for 30%, I will primarily use more my skills in architectur

> My expectations for the roles like Staff / Principal Engineer are that while staying hands-on, say for 30%, I will primarily use more my skills in architecture, engineering, and communications to focus on large, important pieces of functionality, technical decisions with big impact, etc. > Now I think to plan switching to a EM track or to Technical Product management. Thank you! I think you should refine a bit on what you are really looking for. Roles with 30% coding and a TPM role are extremely different. Is the most important thing to you large scope? Deep technical work? Or a high compensation? All of them are available, but potentially at different companies and not all at once. At Amazon a principal engineering role usually comes with the huge scope you described - but many engineers on that level will not be 30% hands on coding due to other responsibilities taking up time. I heard its a bit different at the other big companies, where the scope might be more on the team level as you described. For startups there is likely nothing in common. If you like technical work and think you add a lot of value there - you might want to stay on this path (whether its the wide or deep one). The management path will be very different. One thing you might want to consider for the principal IC path is that it will require significant investments to stay on top of this role: Technology is constantly changing - we have new programming languages, new tools (containers), new environments (cloud), new paradigms (devops), etc. In the most senior roles you will always be expected to be on top of those things and know more about them than the average senior engineer who you can guide. So I think you definitely should bring in a far amount of curiuosity to learn new things at a very deep level to keep staying successful.