# Gaining seniority We see much more job applicant competition for junior roles (0-1 years of experience) as compared to more senior roles (2+ years of experience).\ \ Here we list some basic things we recommend to focus on in order to better qualify for more senior roles in a large successful tech company: * Focus on a small number of modern technologies to master * Deprioritize technologies like C# and PHP * Keep learning the basics of other new technologies to understand your architectural options * Switch to teams with stronger developers, better work culture, and processes * Take more responsibilities in more impactful projects * Gain experience designing systems * Measure your impact on users (e.g. latency, usage) and the company (e.g. cost savings) * Challenge yourself by trying to improve your impact by 10x If you want to get a job in a large tech company and are flexible to choose among backend, frontend, full-stack, mobile, then we recommend focusing on backend software engineering. If you are planning to apply for backend software engineering roles then we highly recommend gaining experience with distributed computing. These skills are rare in emerging markets and are in high demand at top tech companies. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.outtalent.com/guides/becoming-a-senior-software-engineer.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.