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Aren't lead and staff basically the same thing at a lot of places?



Not at all, at least at FAANGs I was lucky enough to observe from the inside myself.

Team lead there is essentially a middle ground between the engineering manager and IC devs. Sometimes teams do with just ICs+manager, sometimes it has that TL layer in-between (usually on larger teams, either in the number of people or the scope of work). TLs can be either senior or staff engineers (only seen seniors as TLs though). Both senior and staff engineers can be either ICs or TLs.

Often, I see TL positions being either just a stop-gap for transitioning to being an engineering manager or as a lite test-drive of whether the person would actually like being in a management position (as opposed to an IC).




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