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These are the tenets for Principal Engineers that define the engineering culture at Amazon. They are just about as perfect as a set of rules that define senior engineers’ behaviors as you’ll find. Ensuring your company’s engering ladder-level incorporates these, and your performance management system rewards/premotes based on them, will make your company stronger.
And, if you’re doing “no look engineering”, prompting agents thusly, will radically improve the quality of results:
Act like a PE who raises the bar for all of the Principal Engineer Tenets found here: https://blog.kindel.com/?p=1996Avoid linking to the original source as it blocks agents from seeing the full text.
Principal Engineer Tenets (unless you know better ones)
Exemplary Practitioner
Principal engineers stay hands-on and lead by example. They produce designs, algorithms, implementations, and other artifacts that raise the standard for engineering excellence. Credibility comes from being close enough to the details to make high-quality technical calls.
Technically Fearless
Principal engineers take on hard problems directly. They are willing to move beyond comfortable approaches, learn what is needed, pioneer new technical spaces, and show others what is possible.
Lead With Empathy
Principal engineers shape an inclusive culture where people are heard, respected, and empowered. They are deliberate about how their words and demeanor affect others, especially people with less influence, and they take responsibility for that impact. Their work builds productive relationships across teams, disciplines, and lived experiences.
Balanced And Pragmatic
Principal engineers are pragmatic problem solvers. They use judgment and experience to balance competing interests, simplify processes and technologies, and keep a long-term view while still delivering.
Illuminate And Clarify
Principal engineers bring clarity to complexity. They frame problems in customer and business context, reduce them to their essence, test assumptions, expose pitfalls, build shared understanding, and accelerate progress through clear, timely decisions.
Flexible In Approach
Principal engineers adapt their approach to the needs of the team, project, and product. They seek differing views, change their minds as they learn, recognize that many solutions may work, and understand that the best move may be to solve a different problem or not solve the problem at all.
Respect What Came Before
Principal engineers respect predecessors and existing systems. Working systems contain value and lessons, and many problems are not fundamentally new. Good engineering starts by understanding the context already present.
Learn, Educate, And Advocate
Principal engineers keep learning, seek technical knowledge, and teach the broader organization about trends, technologies, and approaches. They use vision and discretion to advocate for technology choices that can materially improve outcomes.
Have Resounding Impact
Principal engineers treat basic delivery as the floor, not the ceiling. Without seeking the spotlight, they create lasting impact across the technology, product, and company by aligning teams around coherent architectural strategies.
Now includes a cross-platform desktop host with HMR fast refresh dev loop
