Staff Prep Resource Library
42 curated resources across 7 areas — system design, coding, behavioral, mocks, negotiation, and per-company deep dives. Every entry has a one-line rationale.
System Design
The single highest-leverage prep area for Staff+ interviews. Read fewer things deeper.
Non-negotiable. Read end-to-end; the mental model behind every design round at this level.
Format-matched practice walkthroughs. Less depth than DDIA, more interview-rhythm.
Free, comprehensive checklist of patterns. Best used as a map to find gaps, not as primary reading.
Long-running archive of production architecture write-ups. Skim by product, not date.
Compact, visual breakdowns of common designs. Good for warm-up reading the week before.
Reliability, capacity planning, error budgets. Required for any round that asks about operating at scale.
Real architectures explained by their authors. Pattern-recognition gold.
Coding (Staff bar)
At Staff, coding isn't algorithm gymnastics — it's clean code, complexity precision, and verbalized trade-offs under time pressure.
Denser than CTCI and closer to real interview style. Solve in your language of choice.
Classic. Use for breadth — not the place to grind hard problems.
Curated lists are far better than grinding everything. Time yourself to 25 min/problem.
Topic-clustered with video walkthroughs. Good for filling specific weak areas.
Pattern-oriented review of the question types and how to recognize them under time pressure.
Behavioral / Leadership
What separates Staff from Senior in the room. Story craft, not luck.
Canonical. Read once cover-to-cover, then keep the archetypes chapter for reference.
Pairs with Larson; stronger on day-to-day influence mechanics.
Org-design lens. Useful for behavioral stories about cross-team work.
Long-running blog on the senior IC craft. Subscribe.
Real promotion narratives. Read for narrative shape, not advice.
Useful for Netflix-style direct-feedback stories specifically.
Don't paraphrase. Read each LP and map 1–2 stories to each before any Amazon loop.
Required reading before any Netflix loop. Know the specific phrases.
Mock interviews & strategy
Practice with intentional design. Most candidates do mocks the wrong way and stay where they started.
Mocks with engineers from target companies. Costs real money; worth it the month before.
Free peer-paired practice. Variable quality; useful for raw reps and getting comfortable speaking.
Structured course content; mocks specifically calibrated to Staff bar.
Practical mock-design tactics. Read before scheduling 10 mocks badly.
Offer & negotiation
The last 30 minutes of the process often outweighs the prior six weeks in lifetime comp.
The single best free read on negotiation. Re-read before any phone call about compensation.
Tactical, specific, no-fluff. Pair with the McKenzie post.
Comp data anchored to real grants. Use to calibrate your asks against actual paid numbers.
Periodic surveys with calibration data; useful for trend analysis.
Per-company deep dives
Engineering blogs from the companies themselves. Skim broadly; deep-read for the company you're targeting.
Architectures, infra, and ML papers from teams you'll talk to.
Strong on infra, ranking, fan-out, and large-scale systems.
Streaming, personalization, A/B testing, resilience.
Marketplace, dispatch, surge, H3 — concrete applied systems.
Search ranking, trust & safety ML, payments internationalization.
Idempotency, ledgers, API design. Read before a Stripe loop.
Operational excellence essays from senior Amazon engineers. Directly informs LP stories.
Reference architectures for the Microsoft stack — useful for any Azure-org loop.
Safety, agents, model architecture. Required for any Anthropic loop.
Frontier capability and model work. Read selectively before an OpenAI loop.
Podcasts & talks
Passive intake. Best while commuting or warming up the week before — not your primary prep.
Daily interviews with practitioners. Skim by topic.
Architecture-flavored interviews; longer-form than most.
Practical engineering management and IC craft.
Conference-quality technical talks; pick by topic, watch at 1.5x.