[Ankintol]

Points 1 and 2 describe the jobs of most Staff Engineers (or higher) at large tech companies like FAANG that I know. Smaller companies rarely have these because, perhaps unsurprisingly, small shops rarely have big enough technical challenges to need more than 1 person like this, and they double as management.

3 is likely to be a sticking point however. Once you have responsibility for large projects you are often in a certain amount of resource contention, the chance of avoiding political battles there is small unless you are a known superstar within the company.

If you're ok with that, I'd prepare for a whiteboard interview at one of the big well-paying tech companies.

[TheMog]

That makes sense. I think that I may have consciously been trying to ignore the point you're making that there are only a handful of companies out there that have the sort of problems where they can justify having this level of people on staff, and more than one to boot.

I guess it's a choice between that and consulting, because i suspect there are a whole bunch of smaller companies out there that can use help with problems like that, but they don't have enough of them to justify having someone like me on staff full time.