What's stopping you applying today?
My background is not networking ( it’s math then hpc then broader stuff ) but I keep stumbling on similar problems ( including a beautiful one related to intel NICs a few years ago which led be into a rabbit hole of ebpf and kernel network layer and which surfaced later on the cloudflare blog), and the only tech company with which this seems to be a regular occurrence is cloudflare. Their space is a bit unknown to me so I guess I’m having a hard time projecting something onto the job offers.
I’d happily chat to someone working for cloudflare though - I guess this would help me understand what it is that actually happens over there. I guess I’m a bit intimidated by this unknown yet really good looking world :-)
Can't speak to the locations but the stuff you're interested/experienced in seems extremely likely to overlap with what they do. They do a lot of very deep technical things in all kinds of areas.
my recommendation if you want to talk to someone about it: search github/twitter/linkedin for ppl who work there on stuff you like, and just send them a message and ask for a 20 minute call!
have done it plenty of times, has always been extremely positive
If you have the skills, they have the coin.
They won’t hire some react guy in X country but someone who can find compiler bugs and save them XX+ million dollars a year? Heck yeah.
I'm in a similar position where I'd like to do something a lot more interesting, but intersection between where the interesting companies have offices and where I'd be willing to live do not really overlap enough justify rooting up my life.
(Unless we're talking about "too good to ignore", that's a different story.)
Anyone who can optimize a company’s bottom line will be hired.
Like I said, no random average mid react guy or dime a dozen Java developer is getting hired as a remote employee in some flyover country.
But if someone can provide like 50x value then hell yeah..
I thought that was obvious in my message considering we are discussing compiler optimization
I think there's also quite a big spectrum of skill, even when we're talking about compiler optimization and highly skilled software developers. I'd put myself up there, but still I'm no Lars Bak (for whom Google allegedly created an office in Denmark).
If you're asking what would constitute someone being special, it would depend on the role and skillset. As I said in my earlier comment, someone who is a beast and can find and fix bugs in compilers is a rare person. Especially if that skillset can help the company save boatloads of money that can be deployed elsewhere.
There are probably only a handful of people in the world who understand and can push the AI landscape forward. A lot of them are Chinese immigrants, and yet OpenAI/Meta/etc are paying them boatloads of money.
As for remote roles, I once worked on a project where we hired some dude for like $500/hr as a contractor because he was one of the few people who knew the inside/out of postgres and oracle rdbms because we were doing some very important migration.