What's an insanely competitive job for a software engineer?

Start your own business. That's the most competitive and intimidating job for a software engineer.

> I'm enjoying the low stress / high paycheck type of jobs that I get based on my experience, sometimes I miss the days when I was a junior and I had to compete against others to show off my skills or to meet (fake-ish) deadlines my boss would put on us.

I'd gladly take that low-stress, high-pay job off your hands if you don't want it.

You can join the French Foreign Legion; there's an 80% attrition rate (https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-culture/french-foreign...),

Startups are a good bet. Look for the more ambitious large ones that are worth over a billion, and still trying to grow 10% every week. You can say "we can't do it" as much as you like, but you have to give a counter proposal to still hit the targets. Often these companies have deep pockets too, so that's fun.

Something like Rocket Internet and their portfolio is a good place to start, or someone in the Alibaba ecosystem if you're not opposed to working with China.

Also the larger ones often pass an intelligence filter, so they're unlikely to push you to unreasonable deadlines and stress levels. But it's still competitive enough and you'll likely find yourself in a team with 10x-ers.

Interested in consulting? It gets knocked a lot on here as a profession, but you're constantly building on your technical core strengths to learn something new (business domains like agriculture or manufacturing, functions like digital marketing, etc) and because you're building within your clients' ecosystem you're also typically always learning something new technically. Constant S-shaped growth curve with lots of timeboxes as a forcing function. If you also enjoy helping people solve hard problems, it's quite rewarding beyond pure intellectual challenge.

Go head-to-head against other candidates at a startup committed to outgrowing Amazon in e-commerce, until you get hired then outperform everyone else until you are CEO then never quit competing with Amazon.

Or are you interested in something more immediate and further removed from software?

Maybe step into the ring as a prizefighter, put on a few pounds so you can go above your weight class for good measure.

Or perhaps roller derby?

I apologize if my level of insanity is not adequate for what you have in mind, but this might get you started.

Video game development. The pay used to be worse but it has actually been getting somewhat better lately.

Ive heard stock market, cryptocurrency is very competitive, both a challenge in hardware and software.

Front Office financial technology roles spring to mind.

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