20+ years in the industry, here's my quick take on your situation in the spirit of constructive feedback: - You're far enough into your career that you will ha

20+ years in the industry, here's my quick take on your situation in the spirit of constructive feedback: - You're far enough into your career that you will have to actively work on your career and/or self in order to achieve your next set of objectives. The early career momentum has worn off. - You need to upgrade your resume. Pay someone a few hundred $ to help you with this. Resume writing does not appear to be a strength of yours, learn and improve. - I hire contractors globally for myself and clients. Your resume is easily worth $125/hr on the contract market. If you're only getting $60-$80, there may be some other factors you are not disclosing here that are keeping your rate down. It would be worth engaging with those factors if you want to increate your compensation. Edit: look on a site like Upwork to see what people with your background are earning on the contract market. - The emphasis on San Francisco compensation has obscured the fact that comp has been rising in the rest of the US. First, obviously West Coast companies are much more open to remote/satellite offices. For example, Microsoft and Google have engineering offices in Atlanta. You can see what folks are making by going to a site like levels.fyi and filtering for DevOps, 10-20 years experience and looking outside of California. (Nvidia @ $300k for Senior DevOps in Raleigh looks like a good cost-of-living vs comp.) - If you look outside of pure tech companies, you will likely have to go into management to hit the high numbers. With your experience, if you are able/willing to lend and/or manage engineering teams, you should be able to get into the $250k range in most major US cities. Advantage to non-tech companies is they are more likely to have sane work-life balance. - You may want to consider expanding your skills into a niche. For example, are you able to help companies build data pipelines for data engineering? Machine Learning? There are some fairly niche problems in that area; knowledge of any of those would help you differentiate yourself and drive higher pay. Good luck!