Get to principal/distinguished IC (L7+) by 42 — the rung exists and shifts you from 'hundreds' to 'dozens' scarcity; staying at L6 past 40 caps OVR at 82.

Convert the existing portfolio into named public artifacts (one widely-adopted open-source release, conference keynote at a tier-1 venue, or co-authored landmark paper) — visibility is 'active' but personal name-recognition is the gap between $1.5M and $4M transfer fee at this level.

Pick a sub-domain that's lifting (frontier-AI infra, GPU kernels, distributed training systems) and become the named go-to person — generic deep_expert is hundreds-deep, but a named scarcity in a hot subdomain is dozens-deep and recruited rather than applied.