A friend of mine from a tier-3 college in UP - literally no one from his batch had ever gotten a call from a top product company - sent me a message last year: he had just cleared Google’s onsite. He had been working at a mid-size startup for four years after graduation.
Here is what he did, and what the pattern looks like across every engineer I know who made this jump.
The First Thing to Accept
FAANG does not look at your college name during the technical interview process. They look at your GitHub profile and resume to decide whether to give you the call. After that, it is purely how you perform in the interviews.
The college filter is real at the campus recruitment stage. After that, it is almost entirely irrelevant. If you graduated three or more years ago, your college is already a secondary signal. Your work history is the primary one.
Step 1 - Build a Work History That Gets You the Call
The resume is the first gate. If it does not get you an interview call, nothing else matters.
What gets you the call from a tier-2 background:
- 2+ years at a recognizable product company (not just IT services)
- Concrete impact metrics on your projects (“reduced API latency from 800ms to 120ms”, “owned the migration of 40 services to Kubernetes”)
- Open source contributions to recognizable projects
- A side project that is live, used by real people, and linked to a GitHub with actual commits
What does not help:
- A CGPA above 8 (good for campus, irrelevant later)
- Certification courses from random platforms
- 5 years at a pure IT services company with no product ownership
If you are currently in IT services and targeting FAANG, step one is moving to a product company first - even a smaller one. The experience currency is different.
Step 2 - The Preparation Timeline
Realistic timeline if you are starting from scratch: 4-6 months, 2-3 hours daily.
| Month | Focus |
|---|---|
| 1-2 | DSA fundamentals - arrays, strings, trees, graphs, DP (Blind 75 first) |
| 3 | Harder problems + system design basics (read DDIA concurrently) |
| 4 | Mock interviews, company-specific patterns (LC company tags) |
| 5-6 | Final prep, behavioral rounds, more mocks |
Do not grind 500 problems. The marginal return drops sharply after 200-250. Quality over quantity: understand the pattern, code it clean, practice explaining your thinking out loud.
Step 3 - System Design Is Not Optional
For SDE-2 and above, system design is the round most candidates underestimate. The mistake tier-2 engineers make here is not being comfortable drawing large-scale systems because they have not worked on them.
The workaround: study real architectures. Netflix Tech Blog, Meta Engineering, Google Research blog. Understand how large-scale systems solve specific problems. You do not need to have built these systems - you need to understand them well enough to have an informed conversation.
Two resources worth your time: “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” by Martin Kleppmann, and the Grokking System Design course (specifically the diagrams and the conversation prompts, not the memorized answers).
Step 4 - Get the Referral
The referral does not guarantee the job but it almost always guarantees the call. The call is 50% of the battle.
How to get a referral from someone you do not know well:
- Find someone at the target company on LinkedIn who went to your college or worked at a previous company you worked at
- Send a short message - their work at the company, one line about yourself, specific role you are targeting, direct ask
- Do not ask a stranger to refer you for every open role; be specific
Most engineers who have been at FAANG companies will help someone from their college or former employer. It takes them 5 minutes. Be respectful of that by being specific and prepared.
The Mindset Trap
Many engineers from tier-2 colleges self-select out before they even apply. They assume the system is designed against them, or they wait until they feel “ready” (which never comes). The engineers who make the jump are not necessarily more talented - they are the ones who applied anyway.
Apply before you feel ready. Use the first couple of interviews as data, not as judgment of your worth.
What Happens After You Get the Offer
The compensation packages at FAANG are structured differently than Indian IT companies. Base salary, variable bonus, and RSU vesting schedules are all separate. Understand all three components before accepting. A 60 LPA offer with a 4-year cliff on RSUs is different from 60 LPA with a 1-year cliff.
Also: the first 90 days will be hard regardless of how prepared you are. The codebases are massive, the processes are different, and everyone around you is very good. This is normal. You will adjust.
Bottom Line
The tier-2 college tag is a first-job problem, not a career-long one. After three years of real work experience, you are competing on your skills, your system design ability, and your communication - and those are all learnable. The path from tier-2 to FAANG is well-worn. Apply the preparation seriously, get the referral, and show up. The rest is execution.
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