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No company is hiring an engineering manager who doesn't have 5+ years of management experience. It's not a role you can just apply for as an IC.

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I have actually seen several colleagues jumping into EM roles (Engineering Manager) with just a year of experience being a manager, or even from just being a team lead (technical leader, not manager).

In companies that have the first level of management at the same seniority level as the Senior Engineer, it's very doable.

At at least some FAANG companies (Google and Meta), EM1 is parallel to L6/Staff.

At Amazon you could become an EM1 by switching internally from SDE2 (L4 at Google/Meta). Also, in other companies like Datadog, Cloudflare, the first level of EM (used to be called Team Lead) is parallel to Senior Engineers.

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