Senior to Staff Software Engineer.

Two years after my last post on this site, I am following up on my career evolution: I was just promoted to Staff Software Engineer. Pretty damn happy about it, not gonna lie.

Context

Two and a half years as a Senior IC at VTEX since my return in 2024, focusing on frontend development. Previous positions: 4 years as EM and earlier as IC.

Phase 1 — Re-establishing as a Senior IC (24H2)

During roughly six months, I had to get back to programming. Sounds silly, but when in an EM position you hardly touch the IDE, especially prior to the AI explosion. My personal project bolao.io (opens in a new tab) helped me keep in touch with development, but hardly close to an "8h, 5 days-a-week" flow.

I had the chance to be managed by a comprehensive EM, allowing me to tackle relatively simple projects during that time, as well as fellow developers explaining with great patience how to create Jest mocks, improve TS typings and add good aria labels. Among many, many other points.

In no particular order, I worked on a poc to handle large JSON schemas in a React app, several live projects that required adjustments and new features, and started setting up product business metrics for new apps in my team, among other gigs.

This product business metric is a key element throughout this two-year cycle. At that point, its output was limited with just an investigation document, a step-by-step guide to reproduce, and a few dashboards for my team. The guide was approved in late 2024 in the Frontend Golden Path documentation. A good sign. I also documented a step-by-step guide on how to add a logger solution in frontend apps.

On the side, I contributed to VTEX's Design System, hosted several frontend chapter events, and even made good use of my Spanish lessons by presenting tech topics to another team in my vertical composed of Colombian co-workers.

Lessons learned: Be patient, do not be afraid to ask for help, search and re-learn, be curious and tackle "side quests".

Phase 2 — Growing beyond the team (2025)

In 2025, I moved between several teams. This allowed me to understand the different products we handle in our vertical as well as different ways of working, and of course, meet their members: Design, Product, Support, and Engineering. Today I think that it was not by chance but rather by natural attitude. Over the years as EM and IC, I was always comfortable balancing between projects, teams, taking care of deliveries, stakeholders, and context switching.

I worked within three different teams and even had a "quiet quarter" that forced me to find my own work, understand where I could help my direct and indirect teammates, find out potential future issues, and gain more autonomy.

One of the key deliverables was around the business metrics I mentioned above. I shipped it as an official Frontend Golden Path pillar: Admin Business Metrics, thus reaching the whole frontend community at VTEX. In parallel, I kept expanding our metrics in the vertical's frontend apps by setting up dozens of apps and creating, still dozens, of dashboards. Those dashboards allowed us to identify and fix performance issues as well as discover unknown UX patterns. I presented those deliveries across many events in our vertical and the frontend chapter rituals, and even wrote a blog post (opens in a new tab) for the company. This work got me naturally noticed outside my direct scope.

This sounds easy to say, but the work on the pillar is the result of a year and a half of effort between investigation, implementation, and consolidation. Before this pillar and the contribution document, we had nothing to guide engineers into the Golden Path. During this time, I worked closely with several Staff SWEs on expectations and processes, and co-authored a Way of Working document that defined how engineers join the Frontend Golden Path. It proved efficient as the frontend community received new pillar propositions during the year.

Working on those side quests proved a high level of seniority to ICs and leadership, and I was selected by a Staff+ group to join a special reviewers group that oversees a new process in the engineering org for critical applications. I also entered an AI-powered QA initiative to experiment with, you guessed it, AI and QA.

Lessons learned: Stay close to more senior members of your company, take on challenges that will impact beyond your current scope, talk about a topic you like. A lot, if possible. Show yourself by presenting your work and demonstrating dedication and ownership. Be reliable and do not be afraid to jump on opportunities. They might not come every day.

Phase 3 — Cross-vertical scope (26Q1 → 26Q2)

Early 2026, I switched once more to a new team in our vertical. New context, new teammates, new learnings. I experimented for the first time with AI app development. It was a great opportunity to get close to the AI topic on the coding side to both use AI tooling and produce an agentic app. I was able to build the backend side with Python and use our own AI TS modules for the frontend. A lot of experimentation with Cursor, Claude, Copilot, as well as understanding new internal tooling and deployment processes.

In parallel, I was selected for a temporary mission team to experiment around Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to help VTEX's engineering teams. My work involved idea and problem discovery, organization and planning as well as coding and releasing.

I was also always on the lookout to review pull requests from all teams within my vertical, presented simple experiments and new ways of working with AI to different audiences, kept mentoring, hosted and incentivized participation in the frontend chapter events, as well as updated/migrated frontend tooling or dependencies in many projects.

Later in Q2, I was invited to be officially part of a second team for the SDLC evolution at VTEX. Aside from the many experiments and deliveries we made, I bridged those with my vertical's teams to gather valuable feedback from one side to the other. Connecting topics is something I naturally do. Probably the EM experience being of great help here.

Lessons learned: dedication pays off. Own the process as much as you can, not just the development part: investigations, team alignments, experimentations, follow-ups, deployments, bug fixes, maintenance, etc. At a particular career stage, look at your product globally, develop a proactive risk-mitigation strategy for developers around you, anticipate trouble, and clear the path for co-workers to develop features.

A few notes

Remember the "Business Metrics" from phase 1 (2024)? It still pays off in 2026 as developers keep on using the solution and my impact accumulates. Long-lasting projects are a real plus.

One thing that I have been applying more and more is autonomy. Every time I have a question, doubt, or concern, I try to "self-service me". I look for the potential answer as much as I can. First, to learn. Second, not to bother others. I do not want to be the person who asks but rather the one who answers. Asking is fine when in a more junior position. At a certain point, you must pass confidence, show knowledge, or at least paths to uncover answers.

Delegation is the balance between "I can do it fast" and "I can delegate to others so they learn, deliver, and progress while I take on larger challenges". Not easy but necessary.

I keep using a work log, self-assessments, mid-year and annual reviews. It proved super helpful to show my deliveries and impacts. And write this post.

Closing

This report describes a path that worked for me. It's not a step-by-step guide for others. I just wanted to share a bit of my trajectory.

I'm sure I forgot a few important points, but that's life.

Thanks for reading. See you hopefully in less than two years =)