Comment by JustExAWS

I went from an L5 (mid) working at AWS ProServe as a consultant (full time role) to a year later (and a shitty company in between) as a “staff architect” - like you said two levels up - at a smaller cloud consulting company.

If I had any interest in ever working for BigTech again (and I would rather get an anal probe daily with a cactus), I could relatively easily get into Google’s equivalent department as a “senior” based on my connections.