What are my career options after senior software engineer position?

Another option I'd like to recommend in Technical Product Management (also known as Engineering Product Management). These folks typically sit in the Platform orgs at tech companies or are very valuable to deep tech companies.

In Platform orgs, they talk to internal customers to help the Platform team build the right internal tools. For deep tech companies, they talk to other tech companies to source engineering requirements.

In my observation, this role can be a great confluence of your engineering skills and product acumen, esp. if you feel passionate about building the right thing. It's also more grounded in technology than a typical Product Manager role.

It occurred to me to add a few more points here:

• Since your role must have coding to keep you happy, the TPdM option I mentioned before will make you a very strong contributor because the engineering team will be able to rely on you as a technical PdM as well as make code contributions from time to time.
• Another option would be to seek a Senior+ IC role at a large US-based company that has offices in India. FAANGMULA or adjacent companies tend to have a stronger culture of—and acceptance for—people staying on the IC path in the later years of their careers compared to startups where people can be younger and ambitious about climbing the corporate ladder.
  • You do not have to fit the bill of being a "star developer criteria with good ratings, promotions etc" to chart out this path for yourself.
  • These companies definitely have many spots for reliable Senior+ engineers to make solid contributions and maintain a healthy WLB at the same time, like Alex said.
• In terms of what to learn, I'd say stay on top of most things frontend: both technologies and architectures, and form your opinions about them. I'd also learn how to mentor, and build interpersonal and leadership skills to elevate yourself to a mature and loved engineer others enjoy working with and learning from.

Good question! There's a lot of options here:

• Get promoted from senior to staff - Of course, this will require a modern company that supports IC-levels beyond senior. However, I feel like most companies offer this, especially FAANG and FAANG-equivalent companies (Uber, Airbnb).
• Stay at senior - Being a senior software engineer is already a large accomplishment. There's nothing wrong staying at this level forever, especially to preserve work-life balance. Being staff is very stressful, and I know several engineers who purposely down-leveled themselves from staff to senior.
• Become an engineering manager - This is a very traditional path as you mentioned. But it's obviously not for everyone and spots are limited (there are far more IC engineers than engineering managers). Here's a good playlist to learn more about this transition: [Taro Top 10] Software Engineer To Engineering Manager (IC -> M Track)
• Pivot out of software engineering - The most common paths I've seen here are becoming some sort of project manager or product manager. For the product path, check this out: [Taro Top 10] Product Management For Engineers