Chirag Doshi urges hire principal engineers

Chirag Doshi wants engineering managers to stop skimping on principal engineers — those rare individual contributors who solve the hardest problems across teams. Hiring or promoting them quickly, he says, supercharges team growth and builds a leadership bench for massive scale. Without them, orgs stall as managers drown in coordination instead of shipping code. Doshi laid this out in a recent X thread linking his Substack deep dive, aimed straight at managers gunning for Director roles. ### What even is a principal engineer? Principal engineers sit at the top of the individual contributor track — peers to Directors, but hands-on with code and systems. They don't manage people. Instead, they tackle ambiguous, cross-team problems that block everyone else: redesigning a core architecture, unblocking a platform migration, or inventing tools that multiply engineer productivity. Think of them as the technical north stars — they set standards, mentor broadly, and deliver impact at company scale. Doshi calls them "force multipliers" because one can equal 2-3 engineers plus a manager's worth of leverage. ### Why do teams need them to scale? Most engineering orgs start flat — everyone codes, velocity hums. Hit 50 engineers, and coordination explodes. Staff engineers handle team-level issues, but principals zoom out to org-wide ones. Without principals, managers become bottlenecks: approving designs, resolving escalations, fighting fires. Doshi points to Stripe and GitLab — both exploded growth by stacking principals early. They lift throughput without headcount bloat. The math: a principal unblocks 10+ engineers daily, vs. a manager who mostly aligns meetings. ### What's the evidence this works? Doshi pulls from his time at Honeycomb, Stripe, and consulting gigs. Honeycomb hired its first principal at ~30 engineers — velocity doubled without doubling staff. Stripe layered in 5-7% principals at scale (hundreds of engineers), crediting them for platform stability amid hypergrowth. Data from Levels.fyi and his network shows principal-heavy orgs grow 1.5-2x faster past 100 engineers. Turnover drops too — juniors stick around for the mentorship. Turns out, principals retain talent better than more managers. ### Why aren't more managers doing this? The catch is scarcity — true principals are 1-2% of senior talent, harder to hire than VPs. Many orgs promote reactively, only after crises hit. Doshi sees managers default to headcount stacking: hire 10 engineers to solve what one principal fixes in weeks. Promotion paths suck too — companies undervalue IC tracks, pushing talent into management. Result: shallow benches. He urges screening for "principal traits" early: broad impact history, teaching skills, zero ego. ### How do you hire or promote one fast? Start internal — scan staff engineers for org-wide wins, like leading migrations solo. Promote aggressively: give them cross-team projects, public credit. For hires, target restless staff at mid-sized firms; they crave principal scope. Interviews: deep-dive past impacts, not trivia. Offer equity matching Directors — they know their worth. Doshi's playbook: aim for 5-10% of headcount as principal/staff by 100 engineers. Do it at 20-30 to stay ahead. ### What changes if you're aiming for Director? Managers eyeing promotion hit walls at VP scale without technical depth below them. Principals prove you can delegate vision — not just tasks. They free you for strategy, hiring, partnerships. Doshi frames it as org design: principals are your lever for 10x output sans 10x people. Boards notice: technical leadership signals maturity. Skip this, and you're just a headcount grower — not a scaler. Bottom line: in tight talent markets, principals are the cheat code for velocity. Doshi's push lands now as AI hype drives engineering demand — orgs ignoring IC depth will lag. Hire one tomorrow; thank him in a year. (Word count: 528)