Great article. Here is a very simple test that I use to find very cracked compiler engineers on this site.
Just search for either of the words "Triton", "CUDA", "JAX", "SGLang" and "LLVM" (Not LLM) and it filters almost everyone out on "Who wants to be Hired' with 1 or 2 results.
Where as if you search "Javascript", 200+ results.
This tells me that there is little to no interest in compiler engineering here (and especially in startups) unless you are at a big tech company or at one of the biggest AI companies that use these technologies.
Of course, the barrier is meant to be high. but if a recruiter has to sift through 200+ CVs a page of a certain technology (Javascript), then your chances of getting selected against the competition for a single job is vanishingly small.
I said this before and it works all the time, for compilers; open-source contributions to production-grade compiler projects with links to commits is the most staightforward differentiator and proof one can use to stand out against the rest.
I can't think of any of my employers I've had in the last 15 years that would have cared that I committed code to a compiler project, with one exception. That one exception would have told me they'd rather have me work on a different product than the one I was applying to, despite the one I was applying to being more interesting to me than debugging compilers all day.
YMMV, I guess, but you're better off demonstrating experience with what they're hiring for, not random tech that they aren't and never will use.