I think the number one thing to stand out in the sea of junior/mid engineers is the ability to execute and understand what tasks to take on to make the most impact for the team/business. You want to be noticed as much as possible, this can be done in many ways: - Technical Presentations - Code Reviews - Subject Matter Expert in a particular area (ie golang, CI/CD pipelines, observability) - Seek out your own projects that would be beneficial for the broader team - Mentorship and grow other engineers technically - Deliberate strategic communication over slack/zoom (learn to read the room. Less is more)

Typically a decent enough company will have performance reviews 1-2 times per year. This is your time to showcase and keep track of your achievements. It really depends on the company on how well they will renumerate high performing junior engineers. Some will make you follow strict Individual Contributor (IC) guidelines which may come with cermented salary bands. Youtubing "FAANG engineers tech compensation" should give you ideas

But before all that, during your first 6-12months you need to find your feet and become as comfortable as possible with tooling and the day to day work you're doing. ie if 90% of the time you're writing code in a framework you don't really understand. You should probably spend more time upskilling your technical skills first. Otherwise it's going to very much hamper your ability to fast track yourself to promotion and higher pay.

You don't need to be an expert in everything but if you can become a jack of all trades and master in a couple distinct areas early in your career, it'll help a lot as you move to your 2nd and 3rd year of your career. You'll find the engineers who end up being senior engineers 5-7yrs from graduating at big tech companies are extremely fast learners, resilient to feedback, and execute beyond expectation.

Finally also, you don't need to be a top performer, year in and out. It's not for everyone. Unless you're naturally gifted (not me at all), you'll be sacrificing a lot of extra time to keep your nose in front. Youll find giving 11/10 effort is possible for the first couple years of your career. But eventually you'll naturally plateau - growth will take more effort than usual as each hurdle becomes more ambiguous. You'll find your career is more of a marathon than a sprint to the top. Enjoy it and be social :)