Opportunities at FAANG for startup founders.
After working in tech at various levels(SWE/SRE/Manager/Director) for 18 years at well-known companies in SV, I co-founded a startup 2 ago and took CTO role. The energy was high and everything was great but the last 6 months have been really awkward. We have built a good product that our potential customers love in the demo but generating revenue without dedicated sales people has been tough. The co-founders are not on same page anymore and chances of success are very slim. Raising capital for the next round is becoming challenging so emotions have started to creep in instead of working on the best possible exit at this stage. I am pondering the idea of moving on. What kind of opportunities does FAANG provide for founders who may have startup experience leading a fast paced team and building everything from scratch? By opportunity I mean - title, compensation, freedom to innovate, build teams, etc. Also, some of these companies don't seem to have director, VP, etc leadership roles posted on their careers site.
I’m in a similar situation (4 years in startup land, CTO @ very unknown and small startup with 5 engineers, 11 YOE, SWE/Manager in fairly big non FAANG before). This has been my experience with FAANG so far: - Fb was kind enough to bring me in for EM1 role, but was 0 interested about my last 4 startup years in the interview loop, which was odd, I had mostly questions about when I was a “proper” manager. They decided to pass, maybe because I did ok but didn’t crushed the systems design interview (will never know). - Google is resetting me to E5, recruiter said that after the interview loop they will decide what level I am. - Scheduling on site with Amazon and Apple now form eng. manager roles, I guess I will know soon enough what they think about my last 4 years. - No luck yet with getting the attention from Netflix ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Good luck OP! It’s a tough job market out there.
This is why the entire HR function is completely broken. For all the talk about being “entrepreneurial” and diversity I bet that less than 1% of workers at these companies have actually been entrepreneurs and thus have no idea about the skill set involved. They can only fathom a narrow skill set.
Google will bring you in depending on your performance on the loop either L5 or L6
A lot of people here went through the same cycle going from startup to corp. The important thing is to set a proper positioning for yourself. Try talking to more companies and you will land something good.
Not enough info but L5-7 depending on the true scope of your work and interview performance. Director+ at Google is extremely hard to come in to from the outside even if you were previously managing hundreds of people.
I'm not really sure what you're asking, here. Are there management opportunities open within FAANG? Yes. Are there C-suite positions open within FAANG? Perhaps. The specific buzzwords you've mentioned would probably lend itself well to a C-level role in a startup environment, or somewhere between "Director" and "Head" in a FAANG environment.
Thanks. I updated my question based on your response.