How New Staff Engineers Build Judgment Without Years of Experience

<p>How do new staff engineers build judgment without the years of experience that used to come with the role? Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech, explains why the data-structures-and-algorithms foundation everyone was trained on is no longer enough on its own, and where the complexity has actually shifted now that AI writes the implementation.</p><p>In this video, we cover:</p><ul><li>Why &quot;how does AI affect engineers&quot; is the wrong question, and what to ask instead</li><li>Rehearsing multiple futures: what judgment looks like in a staff engineer</li><li>The case method: building judgment from incident reports and system design history instead of waiting years for it</li><li>Cognitive coordination, code review load, and the surprise ask for more meetings at staff level</li><li>Tiger teams vs scaled teams, trust as architecture, and building evals from a spreadsheet</li><li>Splitting planning from execution so engineers stop falling behind with agents</li><li>Taste vs judgment, and how to build both outside of software</li></ul><p>If you&#39;ve just made staff, or you&#39;re about to, this conversation gives you a frame for what the level actually demands now and how to grow into it faster than the old apprenticeship allowed.</p><p>Recorded at the AI4 conference 2026. </p><p>Timestamps:</p><p>00:00:00 - How AI Is Changing Senior Engineering Careers</p><p>00:00:41 - Why &quot;How Does AI Affect Engineers&quot; Is the Wrong Question</p><p>00:03:26 - What Judgment Actually Is: Rehearsing Multiple Futures</p><p>00:05:24 - Why Data Structures and Algorithms Are No Longer Enough</p><p>00:07:22 - Learning Judgment From Incident Reports Like the 2017 S3 Outage</p><p>00:11:13 - The New Staff Engineer&#39;s Core Challenge: Cognitive Coordination</p><p>00:14:48 - What Managers, Universities, and Shakespeare Each Owe You</p><p>00:17:55 - Code Review Load, Meeting Notes, and the Surprise Ask for More Meetings</p><p>00:23:59 - Trust as Architecture: Why Evals Started as a Spreadsheet</p><p>00:27:09 - Tiger Teams vs Big Teams: Product Managers Reviewing Code</p><p>00:32:39 - Why Some Engineers Can&#39;t Keep Up With Agents</p><p>00:35:46 - Local AI Champions and Splitting Planning From Execution</p><p>00:38:38 - Go Deep or Go Broad? Search in a World of Agents</p><p>00:44:12 - Taste vs Judgment: Thinking in 50 Layers</p><p><br></p><p>Guest: Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech.</p><p><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VLXGe7XlhqEmv5OGbtuMmPXgjrDrPHDm14o7DU1lbdI/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">Rehearshing the Future framework</a></p><p> <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">If</a> by Rudyard Kipling</p>