I did try applying to MongoDB a few times, even made it relatively far in the interview process both times but eventually get the "We regret to inform you..." emails for it. I also failed a phone-screen for CockroachDB though I'm actually not 100% sure why. ElasticSearch never got back to me. I certainly applied for these kinds of jobs (and many, many more), but there's not much more I can do than wait for the companies to recognize my brilliance.
When I worked at Apple I did an internal interview for a team that worked on a distributed-RAID-style thing, did really well on the interview, almost got to the offer stage, but then they saw the previous year's review where I got a "Needs Improvement" for (I think) purely bureaucratic reasons that I've talked about on HN before, and they decided not to move forward.
It's tough, because I think a lot of those jobs are in pretty high demand, and as such a lot of really qualified people apply to them and they can be picky, and I don't really blame them for that. There's a lot more generic unsexy backend jobs.
When I worked at Apple I did an internal interview for a team that worked on a distributed-RAID-style thing, did really well on the interview, almost got to the offer stage, but then they saw the previous year's review where I got a "Needs Improvement" for (I think) purely bureaucratic reasons that I've talked about on HN before, and they decided not to move forward.
It's tough, because I think a lot of those jobs are in pretty high demand, and as such a lot of really qualified people apply to them and they can be picky, and I don't really blame them for that. There's a lot more generic unsexy backend jobs.