Org & Leadership
The staff organizational layer: platform-vs-product ownership, incident command for silent LLM-quality failures, cost governance, the RFC process, and driving adoption without authority.
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After this section you can
- Map the senior-to-staff shift in scope, time horizon, ambiguity, and currency; place yourself in Larson's four archetypes; and articulate what you would deliberately not work on
- Draw the platform/product ownership boundary for LLM infrastructure (gateway, eval harness, prompt registry, cost dashboard) as a RACI across platform, product, security, and finance, and defend the paved-path approach over mandates
- Run an LLM quality incident end to end: the 200-OK detection problem, a severity taxonomy where SEV1 is unsafe output, IC/ops/comms/scribe roles per Google SRE, a 30-minute comms cadence, and blameless postmortem triggers
- Design the cost-ownership model (showback then chargeback, 50/80/100 budget alerts, the 3x cost-anomaly runbook) and drive platform adoption without authority via first integrations, demos, migration guides, and office hours
Staff Scope: Org & Leadership
The organizational layer that actually separates staff from senior: ownership boundaries for the AI platform, incident command when the system returns 200 and is wrong, cost governance, RFCs that survive three teams, and adoption without authority.
At senior, your design doc ends at the system boundary. At staff, the system boundary is where the work starts. Take the site’s canonical deployment — 50K queries/day, ~$0.0033 per query, ~$4.9K/month — and scale it from one team to twelve: 60 engineers, three product lines, model spend north of $60K/year. The technical questions (routing, fallbacks, evals) you already know how to answer. The questions that decide staff interviews are organizational: who owns the gateway, who gets paged when quality drops 14 points while every status check is green, who sees the bill, and how a decision gets made when three teams want three different things. This section is that layer.