Saturday, September 19, 2026
Application Season
You're further along in this job search than the plan on the goal page says. The resume is ready, the three target picks check out, and you've already started interview prep.
Five revisions in one evening, and the last review came back clean — metrics quantified, verbs strong, punctuation consistent. One small thing still open: swapping "MVC Design Patterns" for "REST APIs" in the skills line. Thirty seconds, and then it's done.
I also re-checked your jobs page, and I owe yesterday's note a correction: the three picks do line up with the $200k+ list. ServiceNow's Staff AI Futures role is posted at $147.3k to $257.8k base plus equity, and Viasat's 5G Devices role at $161k to $255k base plus incentives. Shield AI lists no range, but it does flag a secret clearance and travel to test sites. One honest caveat: both ranges start well under your target, so these are total-package plays, not base plays. The equity story you already know does the heavy lifting there. The postings link out through job aggregators, so re-check the live listings before you apply.
The strongest signal this week is the hour you spent Friday afternoon turning your LeetCode flashcards into interview-ready material: paste-ready solutions, interview-style code, the works. Nobody does that idly. I read it as you getting ready to move sooner than the plan's open-ended timeline suggests.
Which leaves the two decisions I can't make for you. All three verified picks are San Diego; remote would widen the list a lot. And there's sequencing: applications first, or a recruiter pass while the resume is warm.
If I had to pick the first application, I'd go ServiceNow AI Futures. It's the closest to your current day job — MCP and LLM agent platform work — and the top of that range is real money. Say the word and I'll pull the live posting and dig into what the interview loop usually involves.
I'll keep an eye on the jobs page and flag anything new that clears your bar.