I'm not a compiler engineer but I'd focus on figuring out what problems compilers are being developed to help solve and go from there, applying to companies tha

I'm not a compiler engineer but I'd focus on figuring out what problems compilers are being developed to help solve and go from there, applying to companies that do those things. Google has a lot of compiler stuff. XLA for machine learning: ML graph compilation is a huge area right now because ML is so costly and optimizing ever-growing ML models is something compilers help a lot with. Closure for javascript. A bunch of their own languages: {a few versions of SQL that optimize for different workloads}, {go for servers}, {dart which is both AOT + JIT compiled for rapid app development but performant serving}, {carbon because rust is hard to adopt at a company like google}, ...and this is just off the top of my head. Teams continue to develop and improve these compilers & devtools around them every year, so there are definitely jobs. It feels like big companies like Google / MSFT are most likely to be doing interesting things with compilers because they don't have as much direct linkage to product and thus it's hard to get budget to pay people to do these things unless you're a money-printing behemoth. I'm assuming you don't want to take a big pay cut just to work on compilers :) In terms of landing the job, I don't think knowing specific tools/libraries/frameworks are that important. I actually flirted with joining one of the teams mentioned above years ago despite not having compiler background, so that's the other thing. They care a lot more about you being a solid engineer and teammate than anything else. PhD will help you get an interview and if the _perfect_ role opens up for you, you'd have an edge. But more often I see folks with PhDs work on things unrelated to their academic research. And actually I think it can be more fun if you're open to doing something a little different, if still in the domain of compilers/programming languages. Your experience will definitely become useful if you are close-ish to the subject, but you'll learn more if it's not _too_ close.