I’m not American so I don’t know what a staff engineer does, and googling the term is not helping much. I have also not worked in any software company that has “engineering teams” which would maybe have helped me understand the Google results.
What you are saying is that sometimes a senior engineer manages to make good things happen?
Did this person get rewarded for this huge effort they put in? You say they already have prodigious yearly compensation, was it at least doubled given that they saved it several times over?
A staff engineer is a level above senior. What they do is make them themselves more valuable than the regular engineer who has been around for 10+ years. As you get experience there is diminishing returns, so most engineers will not make a staff level (though there is plenty of title inflation and so you will find many). A staff engineer needs to know the code (or whatever they engineer) well, but they don't normally write a lot of code. They tend to spend more time thinking about the larger problems (including forcing through upgrades nobody wants to pay for), mentoring juniors, and figuring out the hard architecture problems (software architects have a role, but in my experience they rarely actually create architecture despite the name - possibly because what developers need of architecture is different from management?).
Staff level developers are trusted to figure out what needs to be done without direction. When they are given direction it is figure out how the other engineers break this problem up and do it - typically not do it themselves.
If staff engineers are doing something it is not important to any project. So nobody feels bad about interrupting them if they need help or something urgent comes up. (this also means you are developing your senior developers into staff engineers by giving them responsibility)
> Did this person get rewarded for this huge effort they put in? You say they already have prodigious yearly compensation, was it at least doubled given that they saved it several times over?
When you're getting paid $500k-$1m/year or more as a staff engineer, putting in huge effort and getting organization-wide impactful results is part of the job description. I'm sure it had a good effect on their yearly comp review, but suggesting that their comp should be doubled because they did their job is silly.
Staff engineers (in the FAANG parlance) are, generally speaking, ICs who were previously senior engineers who have proven themselves enough that they're trusted to be roughly autonomous, they're kind of "peers" to engineering managers in a way. While a senior engineer will typically not have the political capital move big politically-heavy rocks, it is typically down in the staff engineer's job description that they are expected to. It's basically shifting from a focus on code and building systems to people/the org and architecting systems that fit the org.
"Did the person get rewarded for this huge effort"
Money-wise? Haha. No. Only in the sense that they further solidified their soft power as someone you shouldn't bet against. And of course the sense of pride that comes with shipping something (that further enriches some capitalist and maybe yourself to 0.0013% of the effect, since that's how much of the company your grant commands shares of).
What you are saying is that sometimes a senior engineer manages to make good things happen?
Did this person get rewarded for this huge effort they put in? You say they already have prodigious yearly compensation, was it at least doubled given that they saved it several times over?