Don't Leave Ash Behind—On Staff Archetypes and the Work Nobody Sees

"Have you stayed anywhere for a while?"

An interviewer asked me that once. It stung—because I knew what they were really asking: Are you just a consultant who comes in for fires?

I was at Mailout for ten years. GoFundMe brought me back after Shopify. TheMuse brought me back as technical lead. But my resume doesn't tell that story clearly—it tells a messier one. We're told to lead with metrics, so I led with fires and fixes. The day-to-day work—the architecture decisions, the mentoring, the quiet prevention—doesn't come through the same way.

I led with my Solver wins because they were impressive. And got frustrated when people only saw a Solver.

The Box

Will Larson defines four Staff+ archetypes—Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, Right Hand. Same title, different jobs. They're lenses, not boxes. And you're not supposed to pick one and stick with it forever.

But look at my recent career and you see a pattern:

Shopify: Given an experimentation platform with low adoption. Decoupled feature rollouts from experiments—teams could ship without data science overhead. 80% more adoption, 3x more experiments.

GoFundMe: Started on a team to help. Assumed leadership when a void opened up. Worked with the talented Mai on the backend. I became the PM's right hand—she trusted me to move fast. We shipped it. In time. Functional. The template editor I built is still running—zero dedicated team needed.

TheMuse: Given what I can only describe as a mess. Kafka nightmares, 14 data sources, credit card processing incidents. Worked with the team, led the team, created new infrastructure. Untangled each one. They brought me back as technical lead.

Messy situation → working situation. Over and over. I entered as Solver. I exited as Architect.

So I got labeled a Solver. People kept reaching for me when there was a fire—which felt good at first. I was useful, and I liked being useful. But it was also really stressful. Really tiring. I was a firefighter that could design the building—and would have loved to—but there was always higher value in moving me to the next crisis. I'd train up the person who'd run it after me, and move on.

The Work Nobody Sees

Here's what took me too long to understand: the reason they can keep handing me the next fire is because I don't leave ash behind. The architecture holds. The team I built keeps shipping.

That stability is invisible on a resume. But it's why the model works.

At Mailout, I wasn't given problems to solve—I found things that needed doing. The email editor was barely functional. $800 and two weeks of engineering per template, per client. So along with CTO Mike Bridge, I skunkworked a better one—our own markup language. One day and self-service. Nobody asked me to do that. I felt the pain, fixed it—all while doing everything else required of me. I don't leave when I'm bored.

The pattern isn't "I solve what I'm given." The pattern is that every fire I've walked into, I left behind architecture. Shopify's experimentation platform is still helping them improve their metrics. GoFundMe's editor has shipped with zero dedicated team since 2022. The work that looks like firefighting on a resume was actually building—I just happened to build during a crisis.

Solver work is what people notice. Architecture is what makes it disappear.

I want to own something long-term. Preventing fires, not just responding to them.

Answering the Question

Archetypes are tools, not identity.

"Have you stayed anywhere for a while?"

What kind of Staff engineer am I? What do I do?

"Whichever one you need."

Where I work, the fires stop. The architecture holds. The team ships without me.

I'm looking for a place where the architect gets to stay.

The four Staff+ archetypes are from Will Larson's staffeng.com. Worth reading the full framework.