How New Staff Engineers Build Judgment Without Years of Experience

How do new staff engineers build judgment without the years of experience that used to come with the role? Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech, explains why the data-structures-and-algorithms foundation everyone was trained on is no longer enough on its own, and where the complexity has actually shifted now that AI writes the implementation.

In this video, we cover:

• Why "how does AI affect engineers" is the wrong question, and what to ask instead
• Rehearsing multiple futures: what judgment looks like in a staff engineer
• The case method: building judgment from incident reports and system design history instead of waiting years for it
• Cognitive coordination, code review load, and the surprise ask for more meetings at staff level
• Tiger teams vs scaled teams, trust as architecture, and building evals from a spreadsheet
• Splitting planning from execution so engineers stop falling behind with agents
• Taste vs judgment, and how to build both outside of software

If you've just made staff, or you're about to, this conversation gives you a frame for what the level actually demands now and how to grow into it faster than the old apprenticeship allowed.

Recorded at the AI4 conference 2026.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 - How AI Is Changing Senior Engineering Careers

00:00:41 - Why "How Does AI Affect Engineers" Is the Wrong Question

00:03:26 - What Judgment Actually Is: Rehearsing Multiple Futures

00:05:24 - Why Data Structures and Algorithms Are No Longer Enough

00:07:22 - Learning Judgment From Incident Reports Like the 2017 S3 Outage

00:11:13 - The New Staff Engineer's Core Challenge: Cognitive Coordination

00:14:48 - What Managers, Universities, and Shakespeare Each Owe You

00:17:55 - Code Review Load, Meeting Notes, and the Surprise Ask for More Meetings

00:23:59 - Trust as Architecture: Why Evals Started as a Spreadsheet

00:27:09 - Tiger Teams vs Big Teams: Product Managers Reviewing Code

00:32:39 - Why Some Engineers Can't Keep Up With Agents

00:35:46 - Local AI Champions and Splitting Planning From Execution

00:38:38 - Go Deep or Go Broad? Search in a World of Agents

00:44:12 - Taste vs Judgment: Thinking in 50 Layers

Guest: Mallika Rao, engineering leader in big tech.

Rehearshing the Future framework

If by Rudyard Kipling