Advice for a Google engineer to jump into startups from FAANG companies

So, just speaking from personal experience, a lot of people in Big Tech come from startups. Big Tech tends to value that kind of background because startup folks usually learn really really fast. I’m not sure how it is at Google specifically, but at Meta, there is actually a term for people who leave Meta and come back since it is so common. They are called boomerangs. I'm assuming it's similar at other Big Tech companies.

I personally know many people who worked at a FAANG company, left to try different startups, and eventually came back. Considering you are a staff engineer at Google, if you were to leave and work on a startup for a year and it didn’t work out, that wouldn’t hurt your resume at all. If anything, it would make it stronger. The fact that you are already senior and then went deeper by taking on the challenges of a startup, that to me stands out.

Also, in other discussions I have seen, people have talked about wanting to return to FAANG, and often they just reach out to a recruiter and got reinstated at their previous level. I can’t speak to the exact process for staff engineers, but I am pretty sure others who have done it could tell you more.

However, I would like to comment that the market is very tough right now, and if you value stability, then startup life is going to be crazy for you. So I think it's more of a question about how long are you going to be ok with instability?