There must be something else thats blocking your way. I did a round of interviews with top notch distributed systems teams that deal with the kind of scale youre describing. All FANGs or similar ranked companies, with 400-600k / year offers. I have no experience in backend programming of distributed systems and every interview I started with "I don't know much about DS: Ive only read a couple books, but here's how I'd solve this problem". Got offers from every company, some chased me for a few months after. Perhaps the trick here was my credentials (in an unrelated field), ability to bullshit my way thru and the skill to be likeable, which is really finding something in common with interviewers.