I'm almost 40 as well, and I've reached "senior principal engineer" within FANG. Ignoring titles, the problem with high level engineering roles (beyond their d

I'm almost 40 as well, and I've reached "senior principal engineer" within FANG. Ignoring titles, the problem with high level engineering roles (beyond their difficulty) is finding problems that meaningfully grow you technically as you can reach a practitioner within the field. These roles are rare because most businesses don't actually need nor benefit from them. The other challenge is that the title inflation really messes with people. For example, a key aspect of higher level engineering is not just technical but understanding organizational shit as well. For example, it's now just about execution but planning and thinking about execution in context of 50 to 1000 people. Take the Amazon curve: SDE I - 0 SDE II - 1 (an intern) SDE III - 5 (a team) SDE IV/Principal - 25 (a big team) Senior Principal - 125 (an org) Distinguished Engineer - the company Using the people scale and how much you impact an organization lets you know where you are within the FANG universe (and the FANG generally are in alignment with titles and pay-bands). This represents another challenge is that being a high level engineer requires a tremendous amount of trust from management to influence everything under their empire. What I recommend is scoping the places where the frontier is being pushed which align with what you want to work on. Second, test the waters if they have a technical hierarchy which can support you. Third, put the problem first rather than titles/comp and be willing to build trust within the organization. Influencing over 5 people requires tremendous trust. The unfortunate aspect is that the duality of building trust can make it exceptionally rare to achieve that level. It's not a trivial level because it requires both the technical AND people skills. The only way I've seen to short-circuit it is to be absolutely a beast on the technical front, and this can be done via an open source project of exceptional merit OR building a company.