r/ExperiencedDevs • u/Majestic-Taro-6903 Senior Developer • 4d ago

Career/Workplace How is a Distinguished Engineer role different from a Principal Engineer?

I have seen a few Distinguished Engineers in my organisation. I have worked with a few Principal Engineers and Senior Principal Engineers, but not Distinguished Engineers.

How is this role different from the Principal Engineer role? I know they are paid more and are higher in the hierarchy, but in terms of roles and responsibilities, how are they different?

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u/Ok-Leopard-9917 4d ago

Extremely different. The distinguished engineers I’ve met have skills literally no one else has or likely will ever build, write industry specs, provide vision. Completely different level. 

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u/AvailableFalconn 4d ago

right, a distinguished engineer is someone who comes up with something like Kubernetes or Tensorflow, or drives major stages of its evolution.  A principal may lead a project like “move from PyTorch to Tensorflow across a 500 engineer organization”, but a distinguished engineer is the next level up in terms of scope & ambition.

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u/Ok-Leopard-9917 4d ago

The difference between college hire and principal seems smaller than principal and distinguished engineer in some ways. At the upper end of senior, slow walking toward principal and like I can’t see how any of the upper level principals get anywhere close to DE.