Ship one named public artifact this quarter (a Terraform module, a Kubernetes operator, or a conference talk on production reliability) — moves you from interchangeable senior to recognised practitioner and unlocks inbound from staff-level recruiters.

Specialise into one frontier infra domain (GPU cluster ops, accelerator scheduling, distributed-training platform engineering) and tag a named project — generic DevOps comp is flatlining while AI-infra comp is in a war-for-talent band.

Move from well-known mid-cap to a top-tier frontier company at this exact career stage — the employer-tier jump from mid-30s senior to staff-track at a top-tier shop is roughly a 2x comp delta and the cleanest market_value lever you have.