I'd suggest you pick an open source compiler and try to improve it. The people reviewing your work approximate those interested in the same area, some of those

I'd suggest you pick an open source compiler and try to improve it. The people reviewing your work approximate those interested in the same area, some of those are probably employed to do so. That'll give you a list of potential employers plus people who know who you are if you decide to apply. LLVM / MLIR / GCC all have significant numbers of employees working on them as well as volunteers, partly because hardware companies employ software devs to make them work for their hardware. I'm not as clear who funds front end work, seems to be big companies that like internal tooling. Compilers are great. Exciting is in the eye of the beholder though, you'd have to expand on what interests you before we could guess a more specific direction to try.