My biggest suggestion to anyone looking down this path is, in addition to your normal SWE responsibilities, really understand production engineering concepts (t

My biggest suggestion to anyone looking down this path is, in addition to your normal SWE responsibilities, really understand production engineering concepts (testing, reliability, alerting, monitoring, running an on call rotation, capacity planning, etc). At a smaller company being the one SWE who can do these things in addition to their normal job roles is probably the fastest skill set to develop to unlock staff promo. It's less important to be the quickest arcane bug solver and more important to be the person who can see all of the problems with a system and work independently fixing them.