It is certainly not impossible. Every "high-end" engineer started out as a junior at some point in their career/life. And I don't think it requires working at a FAANG either.
I don't think there is a clear, unambiguous process but the gist of it is that to get there you need to continually take on larger and more complex tasks. In particular try and find your way onto greenfield projects where you can meaningfully contribute to system design (or at least observe "high-end" engineers engaging with these tasks so you can see how the process looks from "the inside"). If you can't find those opportunities in your day job, either try and find a new day job or try working on OSS projects.
> It is certainly not impossible. Every "high-end" engineer started out as a junior at some point in their career/life. And I don't think it requires working at a FAANG either.
There's a significant group of people who follow a path like: "get an internship at a company with a known brand, then get more and better-known full time interviews as a result, then get one of those well-known jobs and as a result get EVEN MORE interest from recruiters" which must be nice.
If you aren't at one of the schools those companies hire interns from, it's definitely a lot harder, but still far from impossible.
For sure, it's a lot easier for people who did undergrad at Standord/MIT/CM to get the internship (and the FTE role). But we shouldn't confuse "Stanford CS grads are overrepresented in high-end engineering roles" with "most high-end engineering roles are done by Stanford CS grads". Most people doing this kind of work went to a college you never heard of and maybe didn't even study CS.
Oh, I think the pool is a lot larger than that. I've seen pretty good industry hiring representation at a bunch of first-and-second-tier non-Ivies, includes UCSD, Washington, Waterloo, Purdue, Chicago, UTexas, UCLA, and a lot of others. (And similarly, the company base is a lot broader than just FAANG.)
I bet there's a set of 20 or so schools, though, that make up a disproportionate amount of those high-paying jobs, though certainly the long tail is very long.
I don't think there is a clear, unambiguous process but the gist of it is that to get there you need to continually take on larger and more complex tasks. In particular try and find your way onto greenfield projects where you can meaningfully contribute to system design (or at least observe "high-end" engineers engaging with these tasks so you can see how the process looks from "the inside"). If you can't find those opportunities in your day job, either try and find a new day job or try working on OSS projects.