I got my first tech job later in life, as well. I’m now in a similar position as you, except that I don’t think I’ll be trying for principle/staff level for ano

I got my first tech job later in life, as well. I’m now in a similar position as you, except that I don’t think I’ll be trying for principle/staff level for another couple years yet. I definitely feel like I’m able to bring significant value, and I’m on a team where almost half of us have masters degrees in CS, while I have just a BA in math and a couple years clocked in grad school (math again). I tell you what, though: I live for those times when I can make something work easily because I’m able to leverage my math background. It certainly makes understanding recursion fairly easy (many math definitions are recursive), and my graph theory courses help on occasion. I was once even able to help solve a problem that involved calculating the area of a general polygon specified by coordinates, which nobody on the team at the time really knew how to approach.