Want to move. Am I being realistic?

I’m a developer at a Big N and in early July I’ll hit 2 years in my current role. I started my current role as a new grad hire. I’m looking at new roles at other Big N, some well-funded startups, some finance firms, and some earlier stage startups.

Despite being ready for a change, my current role is awesome in what it provides:

• 122k base (started at 107k -> minor promo in 6mo. -> merit increase 6mo later -> next potential pay bump coming up in March)
• 19% cash bonus + 9k stock last year, both of which were effectively close to max given my current role. In showing me these my manager said something to the effect of “we brought you in under leveled”.
• original stock grant was 120k in 3.5yr vesting schedule (got a vest from this today, woo!)
• incredible independence. My manager lets me drive my role and figure out what needs to be done. Consistently receive great performance reviews even though I feel my reality is not worthy of it. I’m fairly critical in self evaluations.
• have owned and delivered on large projects independently, but sometimes slowly.
• incredible flexibility. I can work from home or remotely with little restriction, and there are essentially no barriers to vacation other than telling the team and reasonable timing to business goals.

To summarize: last year comp worked out to ~175k cash + vested stock.

My goal is twofold: I would like to try to close the gap to 200k TC or exceed it and pivot technically into a role deeper in IaaS layers or PaaS container offerings (Fargate, Kubernetes services, ACI). I’m flexible on the second component if I find a good fit in something else, e.g. a financial firm, but I’m deep into virtualization/Kubernetes and would love to drill further into that. I’d also love to see how some of the same issues we see internally are handled at scale in other organizations; I don’t want to be tied to the way we do things forever.

My current top targets are Google and Netflix. I interviewed with Google as a new grad, but accepted the offer to my current role before hearing back unfortunately (still kick myself for this). Google Cloud would be the dream and they are hiring like crazy apparently. On the financial side I’m interested in firms like Bridgewater, Two Sigma — ideally somewhere that has a culture valuing technology.

I’m also considering startups, but I’m not sure how successful that route will be for my goals. I interviewed and received an offer for a well-funded early stage startup (< 25 people, Series A done), but ultimately it didn’t pass my gut check (125k base, .08% of the post Series A option pool). That gave me some confidence on salary but made me wonder if I’m being realistic in my goals?

Now for the bad: my college GPA was a 2.86 (depressed better part of my jr/sr year). On the plus side: it’s one of, if not the, most well-recognized institutions in the world. No one in tech has seemed phased by the number, but finance I’m worried is a different beast. I also applied to AWS last fall and made it to onsites before self-selecting because I felt it was a bit early to jump ship, so it doesn’t seem they cared either.

If you made it through that wall of text, here are the questions swimming around my mind:

• how realistic is my goal of increasing total comp given the kinds of roles I am targeting? Am I being unrealistic to be shooting for 200k or better all in? What about pushing for 250k from a company like Google? I’m totally happy with my current role if I can’t do this, so I’ve been flexing my negotiation muscles.

• will financial firms give me the time of day with a 2.86, even if it’s from one of their favorites universities? Chatted with a few recruiters who acknowledged this issue, but wanted to move forward (agency, not internal, so entirely unsurprising).

• how would you compare roles with similar comp at Big N (let’s use Google) against, say, Two Sigma?

• am I potentially better off looking for an internal transition, given that that’s a possibility I’ve explored much less?

• would a well funded, later stage “startup” e.g. Stripe, Flexport be able to match compensation compared to Big N?

TL;DR: currently 175k TC at Big N and enjoying it. Want to move, feasibility of 200-250k TC and/or will finance accept me with 2.86 GPA.