Not sure. Having been a staff and principal engineer at a few places, my view is a staff engineer is primarily a reviewer and documenter: code reviews, writing

Not sure. Having been a staff and principal engineer at a few places, my view is a staff engineer is primarily a reviewer and documenter: code reviews, writing and reviewing design documents, architectural and coding standards enforcer, etc. Mostly you are shepherding things along that are too technical to be dealt with by the engineering "people" management. Maybe a couple days a week you get to do some interesting coding.