If you like working hands-on, pick a company which highly values that, even at the senior level.
In my experience, you'll have a hard time doing ONLY tech stuff at a company with <10 people even if you're not a founder, but you might find an acceptable level of deep-problems.
I'm really enjoying being in a 50-250 person company (CloudFlare; it's around 110 right now). It's big enough to let people specialize, but not so big that there's a lot of bureaucracy. You wouldn't get near $200k in cash comp in a company of this stage (outside maybe sales), but equity upside can exceed $200k/yr total comp easily.
You probably have to live in a top-tier city (SF, maybe NYC, maybe London) to have a large choice of different 50-250 person companies which highly value senior devs (without forcing them into management), but there are individual companies in all kinds of random places which do; it's just that you're locked into a less competitive job market and switching costs can be higher. I'd recommend SF for this reason, even though I personally hate SF.
In my experience, you'll have a hard time doing ONLY tech stuff at a company with <10 people even if you're not a founder, but you might find an acceptable level of deep-problems.
I'm really enjoying being in a 50-250 person company (CloudFlare; it's around 110 right now). It's big enough to let people specialize, but not so big that there's a lot of bureaucracy. You wouldn't get near $200k in cash comp in a company of this stage (outside maybe sales), but equity upside can exceed $200k/yr total comp easily.
You probably have to live in a top-tier city (SF, maybe NYC, maybe London) to have a large choice of different 50-250 person companies which highly value senior devs (without forcing them into management), but there are individual companies in all kinds of random places which do; it's just that you're locked into a less competitive job market and switching costs can be higher. I'd recommend SF for this reason, even though I personally hate SF.