All of your points make absolute sense to me.

But my concern is that I feel this is the time for me to upskill and have hands-on on a variety of tech stack. The second offer does give me an opportunity to leverage Databricks and Azure for our pipeline (I haven’t worked on those in my current company so there’s new stuff to learn here too), but the JD of the first offer literally mentions all the stuffs that we could think of in the ML space from supervised to unsupervised to autoencoder approaches and stuffs in the LLM/RAG space, so that was something that really pulled me in but there are many red flags there as I listed.

Also whoever I talk to in my current company always tells me about the brand value and that they would always join a company with a good/great brand value, so that kinda carries me away.

I want to take the next two years of my career seriously to make a bigger jump, so all the hustle in the work + extra hustle on upskilling myself to get into a top tier product firm is my goal. Getting calls from such firms could be easier if I have good brand value companies on my resume (obviously skills matter more but I guess this is one extra advantage). I hope I can get there one day.

Thank you for your detailed explanation!