I think there were a few things that helped me long ago, and based on hiring and helping junior engineers with their career paths I think they still more or les

I think there were a few things that helped me long ago, and based on hiring and helping junior engineers with their career paths I think they still more or less work. 1) Silicon Valley volume of opportunities - lots of companies, lots of projects and a region that understands job churn, so no penalties for job hopping for the right reason. I have no clue how things work in 1 company towns. 2) Smaller companies working on challenging projects are desperate for people to grow into new roles. My first three jobs over 6 years all had engineering orgs with fewer than 100 people. Do your role well, and look for next steps as new projects come in. Actually review project proposals and design docs and provide feedback. If you don't know enough about the area to provide feedback, shift the material into #3 below. 3) Work at continuous learning. I did 5 to 10 hrs per week on growing my knowledge. Tech papers, coding side projects, in depth studies of the tools (s/w, infrastructure and h/w). In retrospect, this was sort of my version of 20% time by the pathological definition (I mentally budgeted this as for every hour above 40 I did for the company, I would do one hour for my career). 4) Learn the actual business. Who are the customers, what are they paying for, who is the competition. 5) Always interview the company to be sure there are people you want to learn from who are willing to help you grow. Of course what you will want to learn in two years may not match what you do when you take the job. If you get to the stage where you aren't learning from your coworkers anymore, look very hard at whether you should move on. The modern coding interview is an interesting challenge. You'll get good at coding by writing more code in your day job or as side projects, and that will either show up in the interview, or you are one of the unfortunate "not a great coding interview" people. Practice can help - work with a friend doing fake interviews. Otherwise, some places will evaluate open source submissions to see if you have coding chops, which is of course the actual goal of this type of interview. Finally, if you are desperate to get into a FAANG etc, but the interview path to s/w developer isn't working, think outside the box. SRE can be great both as a career and learning path, as can SQA. Also, you can check into acquisition news - if a company is buying Jane's Software Extravaganza, Inc, and Jane's is still hiring during the acquisition review period, see if there are roles that might work for you there.