How to transition from low level backend to architect?
Hi blind community, I’ve been working at Google for the past 2 years and don’t have any meaningful experience before that. What I like and am good at is highly technical backend work (think database or some other performance critical distributed system). I’m currently happy at Google and am still learning but I feel like the longer I stay, the less employable I become in the startup or small-mid size companies world. One of the things I want to do someday is being the CTO of a startup or someone in charge of the architecture and technical direction of a company. However that requires knowledge and expertise of the entire stack and using pre-made solutions (like Cloud), which is exactly the opposite of what I (and other engineers in big tech companies) do. So my question is: what is the best way to acquire that knowledge at work? Switch to a product team at Google as a first step? Move to a smaller company and learn there? I don’t want to spend my weekends building a side project as I have other passions in life too. If you were in the same situation and successfully made the switch to an architect role, I would love to hear how you did that. Thanks. TC 225k, 2-3 yoe
Switch internally every 1.5 yrs
And don't forget to ask your manager how to grow your scope. You'll never be given what you don't ask for.
I feel like switching teams inside big tech compagnies doesn’t help much, you still work on internal products most of the time. I guess L5+ work is closer to architecture.
The title/work you are talking about is called an Uber TL within Google. It is functionally required to be L5 to be one. If you just want to design systems (that run entirely on GCE) I would look into being a solutions architect. They architect solutions for customer companies on Google cloud. It is a much lower bar than Uber TLs but in turn you have to do some sales
Thanks, that’s helpful, I’ll look into that. I don’t really want to do what I described within Google, I just want to stay relevant in the market a few years down the line.
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