May 27, 2026
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Key takeaways:
- Principal engineer is a leadership role, not a promotion.
- The job is influencing people toward the right decisions, not solving technical challenges in isolation.
- AI changes how the work gets done, not what the job is: senior technical judgment on innovation vs. safety becomes more valuable, not less.
This is a blog post I wrote in 2019 and it’s been my most popular post that I still get questions about. The industry has since changed a lot and is still very much in a state of rapid flux.
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May 27, 2026
