> Feel free to email me if you'd like to chat more
Appreciate this.
Let's say... an important piece of business functionality is divided between five backend services, each of which has its own engineering team. For the past couple years there have frequently been either performance problems or system-wide outages and nobody seems able to resolve it. Engineer X is on one of these five teams. They organize some processes, find some key people on each team to work with them, and convince the relevant managers to allocate resources to their project to improve reliability. The initial project is a success. For the next couple years, usage of these backend systems goes way up, since they are important to the business and now much more reliable. As usage grows, naturally reliability problems keep popping up, but Engineer X keeps their cross-team process operating and engineers participating in the process rapidly fix the reliability problems.
You could call these skills "political" but it might also feel just more like "being organized and communicating with the wide variety of stakeholders".
I've often error-d on the side of side stepping once I get a feeling that people have enough context on what I'm attempting and won't hate me for it :) even if not green-lit by upper management..
But you are kind of past that point. There are a lot of different "archetypes" for being a really good staff engineer. You can become very skilled at a particular technology, or very knowledgeable about a particular product, or very politically effective within a particular organization. For different people, the best strategy here is different. It depends what you're good at, and what you really want to be good at.
For your question - if you joined a new team, what skills would you really need? The answer is, it depends on what the team needs.
I think you might be focusing on the wrong details. The first step in taking your career further is to find a team that is a good fit for you. That means two things.
1. The team's mission is big enough that it needs a staff engineer (or another staff engineer)
2. The skills needed for the role of staff engineer on this team are skills that you have or can acquire
On some teams it will just be impossible for you to become a staff engineer, because there just isn't enough opportunity or importance, as perceived by the management. On some teams it will be impossible for you to become a staff engineer, because it will require a skill that just isn't you. So go find the right team, and then it will be far more obvious what you need to do to become a ridiculously good backend staff engineer.
Feel free to email me if you'd like to chat more, I have been the engineering manager for a number of people who have gone through the senior -> staff period in their careers....