After 4 years at a FAANG and getting promoted to a sr. Software Engineer I got the itch to move but I'm a bit unsure what challenge to take on next. With my current (progressive, EU) tax rate, it doesn't make a lot of sense to just chase the next 20% increase opportunity without finding other type of satisfaction in the day2day work. I love solving tough problems and it feels like at my current position I'm running out of ideas on things that can make a significant impact.
The options I had in my head were:
- Move to another FAANG (which in the current hiring climate is not very likely)
- Hedge funds/HFT firms (apparently can be stressful but gains are well rewarded), dealing with microsecond latency optimisations at millions of ops per second gives me some confidence I can be useful there
- Contracting (not sure where to start building my network)
- Scale-ups (Have a lot of experience dealing with large systems and cloud infra, but haven't seen a lot of successful startups in Europe that need this type of expertise)
- Startup (Probably too risky to take a significant pay-cut for a startup, especially given the average successful exit rate)
Places I recently read on HN but don't have experience with:
- COOPs
- Venture studios