What It Actually Takes To Become A Principal Engineer

Dev Leader Weekly 148

Jul 13, 2026

TL; DR:

Principal impact crosses team boundaries
Sustained ownership beats one heroic project
Visibility should follow meaningful impact
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What It Actually Takes To Become A Principal Engineer

I came across a question from someone trying to understand what getting promoted to principal engineer actually looks like. Not the generic career-ladder language. Not “increase your impact” and “show more visibility.” They wanted specifics, because the advice they had heard felt inconsistent and the target kept moving.

Honestly? I think that criticism is fair.

Before I get into my take, there is an important caveat: my perspective comes from working at Microsoft, and I am an engineering manager. Titles, levels, and expectations vary dramatically between companies. Some organizations go from senior directly to principal. Others have staff between them. Some swap the staff and principal labels entirely. So I am not claiming this is the universal definition.

What I can do is explain the pattern I have seen, the path I took, and what seems to separate someone doing excellent senior-level work from someone operating at principal scope.

You can check out my full thoughts on this in the video below:

Principal Is A Scope Change, Not A Coding Upgrade

The simplest framing I have is this: becoming principal is usually not about being a senior engineer who types code even faster.

By the time you are being considered for principal, the expectation is already that you are technically strong. If you interview at a big tech company, coding questions may still be part of the process. System design will probably matter even more. But being excellent at those things is the baseline, not the entire case.

The bigger change is the surface area of your responsibility.

A senior engineer can have a huge impact within a team. A principal engineer is usually expected to influence work across teams, products, or an organization. That does not mean you personally write every line of code or dictate every design. In fact, I have written before about why senior developers often end up coding less, and principal scope pushes that shift even further.

You are increasingly responsible for questions like:

Can several teams align around a technical direction?
Can this platform support an entirely new class of customers or partner teams?
Can a risky initiative move from an idea to a durable, supported capability?
Can stakeholders trust that you will drive the work without chasing you for updates?
Can other engineers lead meaningful pieces of the mission and succeed because of the structure you created?

That is a very different job from being the person who solves the hardest ticket in the sprint.

You Can Be Promoted In Or Hired In

The person asking the question wanted to know what it took to get promoted into principal. My path was different: I was hired into Microsoft at the principal level.

That distinction matters because changing companies can be one route into the next level. Maybe you are already operating near that level, but your current team has limited opportunities. Maybe there are already several principal engineers and the organization cannot create enough principal-scope work for everyone. Maybe you have been close to promotion multiple times and now have a strong collection of examples to take into interviews elsewhere.

None of that means the interview is easy or that you get to skip demonstrating the scope. You still need the evidence.

When I joined Microsoft, I did not have another big tech company on my resume to provide a neat level-to-level comparison. I came from a much smaller digital forensics company, and I had never worked on globally distributed deployment systems at anything close to Microsoft’s scale. I go deeper into that transition in my journey from a startup into Microsoft.

What I did have were concrete stories about operating across an organization.

One example was taking a product idea that had been outsourced, bringing the work in-house, building the team around it, and leading that area successfully for years. I could explain the business outcome, the technical ownership, the team growth, and the sustained responsibility. The domain was different, but the leadership and engineering skills transferred.

That is the key. You do not need to have solved the exact same problem at the exact same scale. You need to show that you have repeatedly handled comparable complexity, ambiguity, and organizational reach.

Make “Organizational Impact” Concrete

“You need more impact” is frustrating feedback because it sounds important while telling you almost nothing.

So what does organizational impact actually look like?

Imagine you work on a platform that supports three kinds of internal services. You lead an initiative that lets the platform support entirely new classes of services. Now you are not just improving one feature for your immediate team. You are expanding the value of everything your team already built and making it available to whole new groups across the company.

But even that outcome is not enough if your involvement was just proposing the idea or making a couple of code changes.

At principal scope, you might:

Help shape the original idea and clarify the business value.
Lead the design and architecture across several teams.
Get partner teams bought into a shared direction.
Break the work into areas other engineers can own.
Navigate risks, dependencies, and changing requirements.
Keep stakeholders informed without turning communication into theater.
Carry the initiative through delivery and into sustained operation.

That combination is what turns “I worked on a large project” into “I led an organizationally important outcome.”

And yes, influence is part of it. The technically best proposal does not automatically win. If you are struggling to build support across teams, the same dynamics I discussed in why good ideas keep getting shut down absolutely show up here too.

Visibility Should Be A Consequence Of Impact

I have mixed feelings about the word visibility.

I have personally been put forward for promotion and received feedback that I did not have enough visibility. That was incredibly frustrating. My reaction was basically: what do you mean? I am doing the work my leadership asked me to do. Am I supposed to replace useful engineering work with a bunch of artificial self-promotion?

Communication matters. Project updates, stakeholder notes, demos, and reaching out to groups that might benefit from the work can all help. You should not hide important work and then be shocked when nobody knows it happened.

But I heard a framing from a VP that changed how I think about this: the impact should be large enough that the relevant parts of the organization naturally have some visibility into it.

Not every person needs every implementation detail. The point is that the work touches a broad enough surface area that leaders and partner teams can say, “Yes, I know that initiative. I understand why it matters, and I know this person is driving it.”

That is different from doing small-scope work and trying to amplify it until it sounds organizational.

Actionable Tip: treat communication as a multiplier for real impact, not a substitute for it. Learn to explain the mission, risks, tradeoffs, and outcomes in language each audience understands. That skill is a big part of why I think communication separates good developers from great ones.

Ownership Is The Signal Behind The Title

When I think about the strongest principal promotion cases I have seen, two words keep coming up: ownership and accountability.

People trust this person with an important initiative. They are not waiting for someone else to define every next step. They are not being chased down to see whether anything is moving. They create clarity, pull the right people together, surface risks, and keep driving toward the outcome.

Usually this is not someone who suddenly appeared, completed one enormous project, and immediately became principal. The pattern is more often:

They have already been contributing at a high level on important work.
They consistently make the teams around them more effective.
They take on ambiguous problems without waiting for a perfect plan.
They build trust across technical and non-technical groups.
Then they lead one or two especially visible, high-impact initiatives that make the existing pattern undeniable.

That last project may become the cleanest promotion story, but it is not the entire story. It is evidence that confirms sustained behavior.

This is also why principal scope cannot be reduced to a checklist of code contributions. If your project requires coordination across teams, the difficult parts may be alignment, decision-making, sequencing, communication, and creating ownership for other engineers. Those are not distractions from the technical work. At that scale, they are part of the engineering work.

The Goalposts Can Move

Here is the part nobody loves hearing: sometimes the target really does move.

Organizations change. They grow, contract, reorganize, and end up with different distributions of engineers at each level. A company may decide it has too many people at a certain level and quietly raise the bar. The work that earned a promotion several years ago may not be enough under the current expectations.

That does not make the process feel any less unfair when you are on the receiving end.

You can do strong work, get told you were close, receive vague feedback, and then wait another six months while wondering whether anything you are doing matters. I have experienced the disappointment of being put forward and not getting the result. I have also experienced this on behalf of my employees when I am working for putting them forward for promotion. It is demotivating, especially when you thought you were following the guidance you had been given.

If that happens, try to get specific:

What evidence was missing from the promotion discussion?
Who needed to see a broader scope of impact?
Was the concern about the work itself or how it was represented?
What would make the next review materially different?
Are principal-level opportunities actually available on your current team?

If your manager cannot turn the feedback into something concrete, that is useful information too.

And protect your energy. There is a real difference between stretching into bigger responsibility and running yourself into the ground chasing a title. I have shared more thoughts on pursuing promotions without burning yourself out, because no level is worth destroying yourself over.

Principal Impact Is Shared, Not Hoarded

One of the projects that helped demonstrate my own impact within the principal band was a multi-month resiliency initiative across an entire platform. It had visibility well beyond my immediate team, and I was responsible for coordinating work across a much larger group.

But I did not personally do all of that work. Not even close.

The engineers leading individual parts of the initiative did the work. My role was to help create the direction, coordination, accountability, and conditions for those pieces to succeed together.

This is important because large impact is not a fixed pie where the principal engineer takes the biggest slice and everyone else gets less credit. Done well, it is closer to one plus one equaling three. The overall initiative becomes a strong impact story, and the engineers leading its different areas get meaningful stories of their own.

If your version of principal leadership requires absorbing all the credit, you are doing it wrong.

The best evidence of principal-level leadership is not that everything depended on you personally. It is that the organization could take on a larger mission because you helped many people move effectively in the same direction.

A Practical Plan If You Are Targeting Principal

So what can you actually do with all of this?

Actionable Tip: stop asking only, “What task gets me promoted?” Start asking, “What important outcome is too large for one team, and how can I help the organization deliver it?”

Then work through this:

Learn your company’s definition. Get examples of people who were recently promoted and the evidence that mattered.
Inventory your real scope. Write down the teams, systems, stakeholders, and business outcomes your work already touches.
Find the missing dimension. Maybe you need broader technical ownership. Maybe you need cross-team influence. Maybe you need sustained delivery instead of another short project.
Choose work that serves the mission. Do not manufacture a vanity project for promotion. Find an actual organizational problem worth solving.
Practice telling difficult stories. Be ready to explain projects that went off track, how you built buy-in, where you changed direction, and what you learned.
Create opportunities for other engineers. Principal impact should multiply the people around you, not turn you into a bottleneck.
Consider the external path honestly. If your organization cannot offer the scope, another company may evaluate the experience you already have differently.

None of this guarantees a promotion. That uncertainty is part of why the process feels so nebulous.

But it does move the conversation away from “do more stuff and be more visible” toward evidence you can actually reason about: scope, ownership, trust, organizational outcomes, and sustained impact.

Do Not Let The Level Become The Mission

I understand why people focus on titles and levels. They are the clearest quantitative signal we have for career progression. Compensation follows them. Responsibility follows them. It is natural to care.

The part I do not love is when the entire incentive becomes: what do I need to do so I personally get promoted?

That framing can make a group of talented people optimize as individuals while the company hopes useful business outcomes appear as a side effect. It feels backwards.

The healthier question is: how do we work together more effectively on the mission, and how do I grow my ability to contribute at a larger scale?

If you keep expanding the complexity you can navigate, the people you can align, the outcomes you can own, and the success you can create for others, you are building principal-level evidence. The title may still depend on timing, organizational shape, and a process you do not fully control.

But the capability is yours.

If you have questions about software engineering or career development, drop them in the comments or submit them anonymously at codecommute.com. I would love to hear how principal expectations differ where you work too, because there absolutely is not one universal path.

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