[torginus]

In my experience, staff engineer is an an alternate role to software architect - some companies have the former, others the latter. When doing something that requires serious design work, an architect typically does it by drawing diagrams, sitting in meetings, writing docs, but not doing coding that much. Staff engineers tend to be more coding and technically focused, they bootstrap features by designing and coding the skeleton and coordinate the work of oter engineers in building out the feature.

It's a much more natural career path for people with a coding background but some companies, particularly enterprisey ones with lots of bureaucracy, prefer architects.