What can a junior engineer do to gain a competitive advantage in this market and land a better opportunity?

This may sound tongue-in-cheek, but it's quite simple: be undeniably exceptional in a valuable way.

• Build side projects that have many real users (10,000+ is the point at which you definitely could have know everyone using the app)
• Have extremely thoughtful analysis (and demonstrated passion) for a company you're applying to. This mostly works for startups, not as much for Big Tech.
• Contribute to major open-source projects
• Go to a top school or graduate at the top of your class

As you mentioned OP, the market's rough. You can't stand out anymore by just doing the standard things better (e.g. having a polished resume and LinkedIn). You need to be special in some way. Here are the ways to stand out as a junior engineer (because junior engineers usually struggle severely with these):

Traditional Way: Have A Stellar Network

Back when I was at Meta, around 35% of hires came through referrals. The reason for that is simple - Great engineers tend to only want to be friends with other great engineers. Steve Jobs breaks it down excellently in his video here about hiring A-players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTgQ2PBiz-g

Start seriously building up your network now, both within PayPal (a huge tech company with tons of great engineers) and outside of it. If you live in a major metro region, there's a good chance Taro has in-person meetups near you. Here's the upcoming one for the Bay Area: Meet Alex & Rahul - Taro Bay Area Tech Meetup

If you are able to make a Taro meetup, check this out: "How to Approach Taro Networking Event"

If you have 100+ great engineers who work at top companies and are genuinely willing to go to bat for you, it is near impossible for you to not have an amazing career.

Non-Traditional Way: Build Something Amazing On The Side

There are 2 main ways this manifests:

1. Side Projects
2. Open Source

Side Projects

This is what I did back when I was like you, a junior engineer at PayPal who didn't have enough to do and wasn't learning enough. I was able to build a couple apps with 10,000+ users and that allowed me to get a job as an Android tech lead as a hyper-growth startup with 0 professional Android experience.

I will make 2 courses about side projects by the end of this year, but in the meantime, I recommend starting off with this (it's applicable outside of mobile as well): "Finding a mobile app idea - How to do it?"

Open-Source

I personally feel like this is trickier as it's less in your control, but if you can get the ball rolling, you will probably learn way more about code quality and system design as your code will be reviewed by top engineers at prestigious tech companies. We actually recently released a course about this, which was created by Meta's former director of open-source software: [Course] Become An Open Source Master