Mentors who are principal engineers
Talk to principal and distinguished engineers about technical strategy, organisation-wide influence and what the most senior individual-contributor roles actually involve.
Before you book a principal engineer mentor
How do I choose the right principal engineer mentor?
At principal level the work is mostly not writing code. It is setting technical direction, resolving disagreements between teams that each have a defensible position, and being accountable for decisions whose consequences arrive years later. If that sounds worse than what you do now, that is worth knowing before you chase the title.
What should I bring to a principal engineer mentor session?
The scarcest skill at this level is writing — design documents and strategy memos that persuade people who were not in the room. Bring something you have written and ask for a hard read.
Ask how the role differs between a large company and a scale-up. At one it is largely about alignment across many teams; at the other it is often about being the person who can build the hard thing. Same title, different jobs.
What people bring to these sessions
- What the most senior IC roles actually involve
- Setting technical direction across an organisation
- Writing design and strategy documents that persuade
- Principal at a big company versus a scale-up
- Deciding between the IC and management tracks for good
1 mentor
- Pradeep Panigrahi — Principal Software Engineer at microsoft. C#, Microsoft Copilot, Large Language Models (LLM)