When I finally got that offer letter with the eye-popping compensation package and the prestigious logo at the top, I felt like I’d made it. After years working at a service company and then a mid-tier tech company where processes were relatively straightforward and expectations were clear, I was heading to the promised land: a Senior Engineering role at a FAANG company.
Visions of cutting-edge technology, brilliant colleagues, and working on products used by billions danced in my head. I imagined deep technical discussions over free gourmet lunches and solving complex engineering problems that would change the world.
Five years later, I’m still here, but my experience has been… different than expected. Not necessarily worse—in many ways better—but definitely not what I had imagined. If someone had shown me a “day in the life” video of my actual job before I started, I might have thought they were showing me the wrong role entirely.
If you’re on the path to a senior role at a tech giant, here’s what I wish someone had told me before I started.
The Reality Check
Internal Tools Are Complex
My first challenge came during onboarding. The internal tooling landscape was vast and sophisticated, with dozens of custom-built systems to learn.
Want to run a query against production data or make a simple configuration change? That often requires navigating multiple systems, approval processes, and sometimes coordination with teams in different time zones.
One memorable day, I spent several hours working through a permission workflow for a service my team owned. The process was thorough—designed for security and accountability—but definitely a learning curve for someone new.
One memorable day, I spent four hours trying to get permission to view logs for a service my team owned. The approval workflow sent me through a circular reference that would make any recursive function jealous.
Sure, there’s documentation—thousands of pages of it, most of it outdated. I spent my first three months learning acronyms (we had 347 internal TLAs by my last count) and figuring out which wiki had the accurate information for the system I was working on. The irony of building sleek, intuitive products for the public while our internal tools looked like they were designed in 1995 was not lost on me.
Coding Is the Easy Part
When I joined, I expected to spend most of my time tackling challenging technical problems. In reality, I spend about 20% of my time writing code. The rest? Meetings. Documentation. Reviews. Planning. Politics.
As a senior engineer, your value isn’t measured by how much code you write—it’s measured by how much you enable others and navigate the organization to get things done. I had to quickly shift from thinking of myself as a code producer to a force multiplier.
The Hidden Hierarchy
On paper, FAANG companies have relatively flat hierarchies with simple engineering levels. In practice, there’s a complex web of unofficial power structures.
There are the engineers who’ve been there since the early days—they might be at the same level as you on the career ladder, but their opinions carry ten times the weight in design reviews. There are the “high-visibility” teams working on strategic projects, and the “maintenance” teams keeping critical infrastructure running but getting less recognition.
You quickly learn that a senior engineer title can mean wildly different things depending on the team and organization you’re in. A senior engineer in a consumer products team might be working on fundamentally different challenges than one in cloud infrastructure or ML systems.
What Actually Matters
Metrics Over Innovation
I came in with dreams of architectural elegance and innovative solutions. I had a beautiful microservice architecture mapped out that would replace our monolithic recommendation engine with something scalable and maintainable. I was ready to evangelize GraphQL and event sourcing. I’d practiced my pitch on modernizing our tech stack.
Then reality hit. What the company actually cares about are metrics that move the business needle.
Reduced latency by 5ms with a clever algorithm using consistent hashing and probabilistic data structures? The architecture review committee nodded politely while checking their emails. Increased click-through rate by 0.1% with a simple CSS change that made the button blue instead of green? Leadership was suddenly lurking around my desk asking for daily updates.
One of our most celebrated recent “innovations” was literally moving a button 20 pixels higher on the page. It drove $140 million in additional quarterly revenue. The engineer who A/B tested that change got promoted faster than people who’d spent months refactoring critical infrastructure.
The most successful engineers I’ve observed aren’t necessarily the most brilliant—they’re the ones who understand which metrics matter to leadership (usually MAU, retention, and revenue) and relentlessly focus on them.
The Art of the Incremental Win
At startups, I was used to massive, ground-up rewrites and dramatic changes. At FAANG, I learned that incremental improvements are the currency of success.
Big, sweeping changes are risky and politically difficult. The engineers who thrive are those who can break down massive improvements into a series of small, safe changes that can be shipped independently. It’s less glamorous but far more effective.
Storytelling Trumps Implementation
This was perhaps my biggest revelation: your ability to tell a compelling story about your work is often more important than the work itself.
I’ve seen mediocre projects celebrated because their tech leads were masterful at crafting narratives around impact and business value. Conversely, I’ve seen groundbreaking technical achievements ignored because the engineers couldn’t explain why anyone should care.
Learning to translate technical work into business impact stories has been the single most important skill I’ve developed.
How I Adapted (And You Can Too)
Build Relationships with Leadership
Perhaps the most counterintuitive lesson was realizing that technical excellence alone wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go. At my previous companies, being the best engineer was enough. At FAANG, I discovered that the engineers who truly thrived were those who built strong relationships with leadership while still embodying the company principles.
This doesn’t mean becoming a yes-person or playing politics in a negative way. It means understanding that Directors and Principal Engineers operate in a different reality with different constraints. They’re juggling organizational priorities, headcount battles, and quarterly business reviews while you’re worried about database schema migrations.
I started scheduling monthly coffees with my Director, not to discuss my projects, but to understand her challenges. I volunteered to create the technical slides for her quarterly presentations. When leadership announced new initiatives, I made an effort to connect our team’s work to those broader goals and framed it in terms of company values.
The result? When critical projects needed an owner, my name came up. When reorganizations happened (and they always happen), my team’s charter expanded. And when I needed support for a controversial technical decision, I had allies at the leadership level who trusted my judgment.
Being visible to leadership without appearing self-promotional is an art form. The key is to genuinely add value in ways that also happen to showcase your capabilities. Don’t wait to be “discovered” – actively position yourself as someone who understands both the technical and business layers of the organization.
Focus on Force Multiplication
I stopped trying to be the hero who writes the most code or comes up with the cleverest solution. Instead, I focused on making everyone around me more effective.
I created better documentation. I built tools to automate common tasks. I spent time mentoring junior engineers. I identified bottlenecks in our processes and fixed them.
These contributions rarely show up directly in performance metrics, but they create a reputation as someone who makes the whole team better—which is far more valuable at the senior level.
Build Your Political Capital
I started treating relationship-building as part of my job, not a distraction from it. I scheduled regular coffee chats with engineers from other teams. I volunteered for cross-functional initiatives. I made sure to understand what other teams were working on and how my team’s work affected them.
When I needed support for a project or a design decision, I no longer had to convince strangers—I could reach out to people I’d already built relationships with.
Learn to Say No (Strategically)
At startups, I said yes to everything—that’s how you survive in a resource-constrained environment. At FAANG, saying yes to everything is a recipe for burnout and mediocrity.
I learned to evaluate requests based on visibility, impact, and alignment with both my career goals and company priorities. I became comfortable saying, “That’s not the best use of my time right now, but here’s what I can do instead…”
This selective approach allowed me to focus on work that actually mattered.
Find Your Niche
The most respected senior engineers I know have a specialty—they’re not just generically good at everything. They’re “the performance expert” or “the reliability guru” or “the scaling specialist.”
I deliberately developed expertise in distributed systems observability. I became our team’s Prometheus and OpenTelemetry wizard, built custom Grafana dashboards that actually made sense, and created a trace sampling system that reduced our observability costs by 72% while improving our signal-to-noise ratio.
This specialization meant I got pulled into architecture reviews for high-scale systems and became the go-to person when things went sideways in production. My pager might go off more often, but I’m solving the challenges that genuinely interest me, not just whatever ticket is at the top of the sprint backlog.
The Unexpected Benefits
Despite the initial culture shock, I’ve found unexpected advantages to life at FAANG:
- Scale and impact: After working at smaller companies, the sheer reach of what we build is mind-blowing. It’s deeply satisfying to know that our work positively affects millions of people’s lives every day.
- Learning opportunities: The complexity of problems and the resources available to solve them are unmatched.
- Career capital: The brand name on my resume and the network I’ve built will open doors for the rest of my career.
- Human impact stories: Perhaps most rewarding are the occasional customer stories that filter through—how our technology helped someone stay connected during a pandemic, enabled a small business to survive, or made daily life just a little bit better for someone halfway around the world.
Is It Worth It?
Five years in, would I make the same choice again? Absolutely—but with more realistic expectations.
The job isn’t about being the coding hero who commits 2,000 lines of perfect code daily or the lone genius who architects the next revolutionary system. It’s about leveraging the company’s massive scale to create impact. It’s about navigating complexity—technical, organizational, and human—to ship products used by hundreds of millions.
If you’re considering a senior role at a FAANG company, go in with your eyes open. The challenges will be different than you expect. You’ll spend more time in design docs than in your IDE. You’ll need to become fluent in company principles even if they occasionally sound like corporate speak. You’ll have to learn a new definition of success where your GitHub contribution graph looks sparse but your influence is everywhere.
But if you can adapt, you’ll gain skills that are impossible to develop anywhere else. The satisfaction of seeing your work impact millions of users is real. And you might just find that the role you actually have—part diplomat, part architect, part coach—is more interesting than the purely technical role you imagined.
The author is a Senior Software Engineer at a FAANG company, where they specialize in distributed systems observability. They joined FAANG five years ago after working at a service company and a mid-tier tech company, gaining experience with structured environments before diving into the complexity of a tech giant.
