Please review my profile - Senior Software Engineer

Hi everyone, this forum has been helpful in understanding how to approach my application.

I would like some advice regarding the intended structure and content of my application

Overview

I have about 7 years of work experience, working in Germany for a decently sized startup (about 150 employees).
I intend to apply for the Exceptional Talent route since I have over 5 years of experience in the technology industry

Letters of Recommendation

  • Founder/CEO of Company A where I had my first full-time developer job and has known me since then
  • VP of Engineering for a US company who was my manager at Company B in 2020
  • Founder/CEO of Company C. I joined him to found a startup which eventually failed after raising ~$100k

Mandatory Criteria

Evidence 1: High salary. Showing that my current salary at COMPANY D is above the average for Senior Software Engineers in Germany

Evidence 2: Letter from the country manager (at the time) for a company I worked for in 2018 showing that I led the growth of the developers in the country by 400%

Evidence 3: Certificate of incorporation, architecture diagram, data model schema and code contribution overview showing that I led a team of 4 developers as CTO of a failed startup that sadly never got out of beta.

Evidence 4: Award from a UK organisation naming me as top 50 entrepreneur to watch.

Optional Criteria 2

Evidence 5: Popular open-source project that I maintain:

  • 5.5k stars
  • Generally top 5 among alternatives
  • Letter from the original creator saying that I’m basically doing all the work now.

Evidence 6: Open source projects that I created myself. These all have me as the only contributor

  • I’ve decided to highlight 6 of them
  • 3 of them have over 100 stars
  • They all see between 300 and 1,700 clones in 14 days (by GitHub insights)

Evidence 7: Open source projects that I’ve contributed to

  • Vary in popularity, from 11,000 stars to 100 stars
  • Most of these have only 1-2 commits from me
  • I wanted to highlight that I have a track record of contributing to the community

Optional Criteria 3

Evidence 8: Letter from the CTO of my current company stating how I’ve been critical to the new product the company launched in 2022. Also, some data showing how successful the product has been despite being only 6 months old.

Evidence 9: My personal blog which has seen over 25k views in the past year. With screenshots of both analytics and Google Search Console. Highlighting a few articles that rank in position 1-3 for certain search queries.

Evidence 10: Details of my solo SaaS blogging platform that hosts over 100 active blogs (i.e. blogs with at least one published post)

My concerns

  • Since there are barely any traces of the failed startup left currently, is it too risky to use it as a mandatory criteria?
  • Is my OC2 too open-source heavy? Are all of the pieces of evidence just saying the same thing?
  • Does my blog count as having “impact”? Especially since there is no public way to verify my claims of having 25k visits.
  • Is a SaaS product considered as having impact?

Can you please share some advice @May @Francisca_Chiedu.

(OC3 impact) Most of your OC3 evidence like personal blog doesn’t look like it’s addressing the guideline for "made significant technical, commercial or entrepreneurial contributions to the field as a founder, senior executive, board member or employee of a product-led digital technology company".
How is your personal blog and the blogging platform a contribution to a product-led digital technology company?

(Failed startup) Assessors may look to verify your evidence from external, independent sources so it may be risky to put evidence that isn’t verifiable.

(Open source heavy) It’s always nice to have a variety of examples to fulfill a criteria, but I don’t see any issues with having multiple examples of a similar evidence as long as they satisfy the criteria.

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