"challenge, mission, technologies, or quality" It's difficult to optimize this many different things at once. Odds are, when you have multiple opportunities, n

"challenge, mission, technologies, or quality" It's difficult to optimize this many different things at once. Odds are, when you have multiple opportunities, no single opportunity will be the best in each category. I care about "interesting/challenging" (I find challenging things interesting :P) and "impactful" and picking between the two can be a source of stress for me. Getting a bit more meta, are you task-oriented, goal-oriented, people-oriented? What truly makes 40 hours a week more pleasant for you? To actually answer your question, I enjoy performance engineering (impact: $$$) and distributed systems engineering / SRE (impact: availability, and the headcount you need to run the system). So I enjoy working on a large video platform. Large cloud providers in general seem like a fit. Alternatively, to get the same kicks, I'd consider scientific computing (it has the same economics, it's worth doing clever technical things to save $$$), or embedded/gamedev (where you want to do as much as you can within limited constraints)