How I landed a $392k offer at FAANG after getting laid off from LinkedIn
I wrote a post here a couple years ago about landing a $287k offer at FAANG+. A lot has happened since then, and I wanted to share my wins (and losses) for going through it right now.
I got laid off from LinkedIn. No warning, no performance issue. Just a mass shitcanning. I had relocated across the country for that job. So that was fun.
I gave myself a week to feel sorry for myself (and move BACK across the country), then got back to grinding. I applied broadly and tried to be strategic about it. Over the course of about two months, I did somewhere around 20 interviews. Some went well. Some went laughably poorly.
Netflix rejected me after the first half of the onsite. That hurt. I had spent a lot of time preparing specifically for their spark round, and I was dead in the first 5 minutes. Something about executor retry behavior.
I made it deep into loops at FAANG, OpenAI, and Airbnb. All three came back with offers:
- FAANG: E5, 392k ($230k base + $150k stock/yr + 12.5k signing (50k amortized)
- OpenAI: 290k - the leveling and equity structure made it less competitive than it looked on paper
- Airbnb: 320k - competitive offer, great team, but the TC gap was significant (layoff hurt)
I almost got downleveled at FAANG. The initial signal from my system design round came back mixed, and my recruiter told me hiring committee was debating E4 vs E5. I asked my recruiter if I could strengthen the E5 case, and ended up in a f/u data modeling round. 4 days later they came back at E5.
If I had to distill the biggest difference between interviewing at this level vs. where I was a few years ago: behavioral/architecture matters so much more. At E5, they pushed hard on ambiguity, tradeoffs, and how I influenced decisions when I didn't have authority. I leaned heavily into real examples from LI where I had to untangle bad architecture with unhelpful information.
Getting laid off was humbling. Moving across the country for a job and then losing it was humbling. Getting rejected by Netflix was depressing. Almost getting downleveled was scary. But I kept blanketing resumes, grinding questions, diving deeper than anyone should ever have to into Spark executors, and it all worked out in the end.
Now I'm strapped in and ready for the next round of layoffs (it never ends)