Which Archetype Are You?

The standard career ladder implies that seniority is a straight line — Junior, Mid-level, Senior — and that the job just gets bigger with each step. At the Staff level, that model breaks down. Will Larson, in An Elegant Puzzle, identifies four distinct archetypes that the role fractures into, each representing a different shape of impact rather than simply a higher degree of the same one.

The Tech Lead guides the approach and execution of a specific team — the person who ensures the logic is sound, the delivery is consistent, and the team is moving in the same direction. The Architect operates at wider scope, owning the standards and direction of entire domains: how APIs are designed, how data flows across teams, where the technical bodies are buried. The Solver is deployed to problems nobody else has cracked — the longstanding bug, the intractable legacy system, the incident that keeps recurring. The Right Hand works closely with a senior leader, taking on complex organizational or technical problems that require operating with the leader's authority and context rather than from a fixed team.

Most engineers drift toward one of these naturally, shaped by what they find energizing and where they've historically had the most impact. The shift that happens at the Staff level is recognizing that drift as a choice — and making it deliberately. Trying to be all four tends to produce a diluted version of each. Leaning into the one that fits tends to produce the kind of work that's hard to replicate.

The question worth sitting with isn't "which archetype sounds most impressive?" It's which one describes the work that, when you're doing it, doesn't feel like work at all.