# HN Staff Posts Grew 3.6x. Source the RFD Authors, Not the Title

_Staff-level posts on HN grew 3.6x as the board shrank. Here is how to find staff engineers by their RFCs, ADRs and migrations instead of their title._

- Canonical URL: https://www.refolk.ai/blog/hn-staff-posts-grew-source-rfd-authors-not-title
- Published: 2026-11-14
- Reading time: 9 min
- Keywords: how to find staff engineers, sourcing staff software engineer, hiring principal engineer startup, staff engineer title inflation, staff engineer vs senior engineer hiring

If you're hiring a staff or principal engineer, you're running the same title search as every other company hiring at that level, against the same profiles. A Show HN analysis of Hacker News "Who's Hiring?" threads found that posts naming staff-level roles rose from 77 in 2019 to 277 in 2026, even though the board itself got smaller. Those 277 posts are your competition, and the way out is to search for the work instead of the title.

## Why is the "Staff Engineer" search so crowded in 2026?

The search is crowded because more companies want staff-level engineers while the channel they use to find them is shrinking. On HN, staff-level posts grew 3.6x from 2019 to 2026 over a board that got smaller.

The counts:

- **2026:** 277 of 2,932 posts named a staff-level role (about 9.4%). Only 41 named a junior role (about 1.4%).
- **2019:** 77 staff-level posts and 163 junior posts.
- **The board itself:** a separate DEV analysis of 9,194 roles found company posts falling from about 361 a month in Q4 2025 to about 240 in Q3 2026, down 33%. Roles fell by roughly the same share, from 850 to 577 a month.
- **Seniority mix:** in that same dataset, senior, staff, principal and lead roles made up 35 to 46% of all roles.

The ratio is the important part. In 2019, staff-level posts were about half as common as junior posts. By 2026 there were almost seven of them for every junior post.

> **6.8:1** Staff-level to junior posts on HN "Who's Hiring?" in 2026
>
> In 2019 the ratio was 0.47:1, so it flipped while the board shrank.

Here's why that hurts sourcing. A staff title filter, or a boolean string like `"staff engineer" OR "staff software engineer"`, returns roughly the same ranked list to everyone who runs it. The profiles near the top get the most messages, so they are also the people least likely to answer yours. When a shrinking market spends more of its hiring effort on one level, everyone ends up in the same queue.

> **Staff engineering roles open now** - [see the open roles](https://www.refolk.ai/jobs/search?family=engineering&seniority=staff)
>
> Live staff-level engineering postings from Refolk's job board, so you can see who you are competing with.

## What does "Staff" actually mean at different companies?

What "Staff" means depends on company size and ladder: a Senior Engineer at Meta (E5) typically maps to Staff at a scale-up and to Principal or Founding Engineer at a startup under 30 people. That spread is why the title is such a weak filter.

**Staff engineer title inflation** is when a company hands out a level-bearing title faster than the scope behind it grows. Here is how the same engineer maps across company sizes, according to a 2026 comparison of engineering levels:

- **Meta:** Senior Engineer (E5)
- **Scale-up like Stripe or Databricks:** Staff Engineer
- **Startup with fewer than 30 people:** Principal or Founding Engineer

Two forces push titles upward at small companies. The first is retention. Once one engineer gets a Staff title, the next person hired at a similar level gets it too, so compression only goes up. The second is that below about 200 engineers, titles follow hiring pressure more than calibration. A Staff title at a 40-person company often tells you what it took to close the candidate, not how they were leveled.

Pay shows how loosely the title is used. ZipRecruiter and Levels.fyi describe the same title, and their figures are more than $500,000 apart at the top. Levels.fyi puts US median total comp for staff engineers at $425K in 2024 and $457K in 2025, up 7.52%. The DEV dataset has the median US software engineer salary midpoint sitting in a $177K to $195K band all year. One title covers all of that.

> A title search puts a senior engineer at a 600-person logistics company in the same results as a Meta E6.

### Staff engineer vs senior engineer hiring: scope is the difference

Will Larson's StaffEng work argues that "staff engineer" means four fairly different jobs depending on the company:

1. **Tech Lead:** guides one team's approach and delivery.
2. **Architect:** owns technical direction across a critical area.
3. **Solver:** gets pointed at hard, ambiguous problems one after another.
4. **Right Hand:** extends an executive's reach across the organization.

None of these is defined by the title on a profile. They're defined by work that crosses team boundaries. So when you separate staff from senior candidates, the real question is whether this person has owned a decision that other teams had to live with. Seniority in years doesn't answer it.

## Who does a "Staff Engineer" title search miss?

A "Staff Engineer" title search misses everyone whose employer doesn't use the title, and that includes OpenAI and Anthropic, the frontier labs most founders want to hire from. Some of the best staff-scope engineers in the US have no searchable level at all.

In Refolk's index of professional profiles, **116,412** currently employed people in the US hold a Staff or Principal (Software) Engineer title. Another **15,908** US profiles carry the flat title "Member of Technical Staff." A Member of Technical Staff (MTS) title is a single title some companies give across all engineering levels. In a 25-profile sample of those MTS profiles, OpenAI (10) and Anthropic (10) dominated, followed by SpaceX Super Intelligence, Vercel, Databricks and Modal.

| Segment | Count / figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| US, Staff/Principal Engineer titles | 116,412 | Refolk's index |
| Germany, Staff/Principal Engineer titles | 3,771 | Refolk's index |
| US vs Germany multiple | ~30.9x | Derived |
| US, "Member of Technical Staff" | 15,908 | Refolk's index |
| MTS as % of US Staff/Principal pool | ~13.7% | Derived |
| HN staff-to-junior ratio, 2019 vs 2026 | 0.47:1 to 6.8:1 | Derived from Show HN counts |

One caveat matters. MTS covers every level, so some of those 15,908 are early-career. You can't treat the flat title as a staff signal any more than you can trust an inflated one. You still need evidence of scope. But not one of them shows up when you search for "Staff Engineer."

> **15,908** US profiles titled "Member of Technical Staff"
>
> About 14% the size of the titled Staff/Principal pool, and a "Staff Engineer" search returns none of them.

Oxide Computer Company goes further. In its own words, "There are no levels, no ladders, and effectively no titles," and it pays everyone the same ($275K, per its careers page). Its engineering runs on public RFDs (Requests for Discussion), and each RFD's discussion comes from a pull request on GitHub. So the authorship and review history that marks staff-level work is public, even though no title points to it.

## Should a startup search "Principal" instead of "Staff"?

Search both, and give "Principal" more weight than you'd expect, because smaller companies often use it for staff-scope work. If you're hiring a principal engineer at a startup, the candidates you want may hold either title, or neither.

In a 25-profile sample from Refolk's US Staff/Principal pool, titles containing "Principal" outnumbered titles containing "Staff" 17 to 8. The single most common exact title was "Principal Engineer" (10), ahead of "Staff Software Engineer" (6). In the German sample the split was even, 12 to 12. These samples are small, so read them as a signal, not as measured shares.

The mechanism follows from the leveling map above. A sub-30-person startup labels the equivalent of a Meta E5 as Principal or Founding Engineer, so a search on "Staff" alone underweights exactly the startup-shaped candidates a startup founder tends to want. The opposite risk is real too. A "Principal" at a 20-person company may have senior-level scope that got a bigger title through hiring pressure. Search widely on titles, then judge narrowly on artifacts.

## Why is staff hiring in Germany harder than the numbers suggest?

Germany's titled pool is thin, but its talent pool isn't. Local ladders are short, so the same work goes by "Senior" or "Lead."

Refolk's index finds **3,771** people in Germany with Staff or Principal Engineer titles, about 31 times fewer than in the US. The top employers in the sample were Datadog, envelio, ServiceNow, AWS and HelloFresh, and the profiles cluster in Berlin and Hamburg. Several of those are subsidiaries of US companies that bring the US ladder with them. Local scale-ups with shorter ladders call the equivalent engineers "Senior" or "Lead," so they never appear in a Staff search.

If you're hiring a staff engineer in Berlin, a title search gives you a few thousand names across the whole country. Many of them sit at US-headquartered subsidiaries, and every other recruiter in Europe is messaging the same people. This is usually the point where the search stalls and founders start pricing out agency fees.

## How to find staff engineers by the work they've done

Search for the artifacts that staff-level work leaves behind, not for the title. Cross-team design and ownership leave a public or semi-public trail that title filters can't see.

Here are the signals, roughly in order of how strongly they point to staff scope:

1. **RFC and RFD authorship.** An RFC (Request for Comments) is a written design proposal circulated for review before anything gets built. Authors of accepted RFCs, especially ones spanning several teams, are doing Architect-style work. Oxide's RFD pull requests are the cleanest public example.
2. **ADR authorship.** An ADR (Architecture Decision Record) is a short document recording a significant technical decision and why it was made. Look for authors of commits to `docs/adr` or `decisions/` directories in public repos.
3. **Cross-repo design work.** Engineers whose commits and reviews span several repositories in one GitHub organization are working across team boundaries, the defining trait of Larson's Tech Lead and Architect archetypes.
4. **Migration ownership.** Someone who led a move from one database, framework or build system to another owned a decision other teams had to follow. Look for deprecation PRs, codemods and conference talks about migrating X to Y. That's the Solver archetype.
5. **Maintainer status at flat-ladder companies.** CODEOWNERS entries, maintainer roles on a company's open-source projects, and repeated reviews on other people's PRs at places like Oxide, or at labs that use MTS.

Each signal is checkable, which is more than you can say for a title. The catch is that checking them by hand means reading commit graphs repo by repo.

> **Example search:** "Find backend engineers in Berlin or Hamburg who authored architecture decision records or led a database migration across multiple repos, regardless of title." - [run it on Refolk](https://www.refolk.ai/s/ckghkfwmfj)
>
> You get a ranked list of engineers whose GitHub and public writing show cross-team design ownership, each with the specific RFCs, ADRs or migration PRs that matched.

A short workflow that holds up:

- Run the titled search anyway, but treat it as the crowded baseline.
- Run a second, title-blind search for two or three of the artifacts above, scoped to your stack.
- Put the people who show up only in the second list at the top. Nobody else is messaging them.

When you reach out, point to the specific artifact that made you write ("your RFD on the storage migration"). It proves you read their work, and it separates your message from the templated title-match messages they already get.

## FAQ

### What is the difference between a staff engineer and a senior engineer when hiring?

A senior engineer owns delivery within one team. A staff engineer owns decisions that cross teams, as a Tech Lead, Architect, Solver or Right Hand in Will Larson's terms. Titles blur this because a Meta E5 Senior often maps to Staff at a scale-up and to Principal at a startup under 30 people. So check for cross-team artifacts like RFCs, ADRs and migrations rather than trusting the title.

### Is "Member of Technical Staff" a staff-level title?

No, not by itself. MTS is a flat title used across all engineering levels. Refolk's index counts 15,908 US profiles with it, and OpenAI and Anthropic led a 25-profile sample of them. Some are staff-scope and some are early-career, so you need evidence of scope to tell them apart.

### How many staff and principal engineers are there in the US?

Refolk's index counts 116,412 currently employed US profiles with a Staff or Principal (Software) Engineer title, compared with 3,771 in Germany. That count leaves out flat-title engineers (15,908 US MTS profiles) and people at companies like Oxide that use no titles at all, so the real pool of staff-scope talent is bigger than any title count.

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_From the Refolk blog. More posts: https://www.refolk.ai/blog/index.md_