I am a SWE with decent development and architectural skills (passed several leetcode interviews at FAANG and also shipped significant features in my career). I am noticing that I don't enjoy being a feature developer anymore, it's getting quite boring. I much prefer being close to infra, particularly in the area of performance. I really enjoy tinkering with distributed systems and/or low level stuff, and the teams I work with know that I am the go-to guy when it comes to performance optimizations and infrastructure problems, since I usually provide good help. The stuff I particularly enjoy range from solving typical application performance problems (e.g. CPU/memory profiling, with the subsequent architectural changes required to increase efficiency) to digging down the stack, networking, Linux, ... It is not uncommon for me to find an issue (e.g. say an unexpected socket behavior) and use a bunch of troubleshooting tools to figure it out, or even going into the Linux kernel code to find exactly what is going on. What position/company would you recommend I look into? FYI, I passed an interview at Google for SWE-SRE last year, but they lowballed me tremendously (it was an L4 offer at ~270k TC -- I asked them why the hell would I switch company for 30% less TC?!) so I didn't accept. I am trying to at least get my same TC. TC: 350k YOE: 9
HFT firms are always hiring devs with strong infrastructure and performance skills, and can easily beat 350k. Speed is the name of the game so performance tuning is a huge part of the business
Thanks! Since you are at citadel and clearly know the sector, which companies would you suggest I research?
CitSec, HRT, Jump, Tower Research
Check out performance and capacity engineer role at FB.
Thanks. Are they internally seen as “prestigious” as SWE? Asking to understand growth possibilities and TC.
Yes, pretty much similar from comp and career growth perspectives.
I think most autonomous car companies are interested in performance optimization engineers.
Happy to answer once you're done performing autofellatio 😒
Done. Could you share some advice now? Appreciated! It was really all to convey the idea of what I’d like to do on my daily job, I didn’t see it as bragging (more like listing the things that get me excited and I think I’m relatively good at) and I apologize if it rubbed you the wrong way.
🤣 Automate everything ...