I'm a bit surprised by what you write.<p>Until recently I was heading a compiler team. We found it impossible to hire experienced compiler engineers despite paying very well, so we essentially switched to
hiring promising university graduates and trained them on the job. My peers in other companies are all in the same situation.<p>Note that there is a mismatch between academic and industrial compiler work. A university compilers course is necessary, but not sufficient to be considered experienced, you should have good knowledge of things like
ABI design, ELF, DWARF, LLVM's tablegen, C++, compilation of varargs etc. This stuff
is not typically taught in compiler courses (for good reason, since it is a bit arbitrary) but it is absolutely vital to producing a working, industrial strength compiler.
You should also have some idea about computer architecture, so you can read ISA manuals and understand what individual machine instructions do, and what performance characteristics they have. Otherwise you won't be able to write good instruction selection and scheduling. Given the increasing prevalence of JIT compilers (eg eBPF in the Linux kernel), it's also useful to know about that. Another dimension is security: modern compilers to need to worry about stack canaries, shadow stacks etc. This too is not taught at universities.<p>Regarding what tool/library/framework, skills are rather transferrable, so I would not worry too much about this. LLVM is by far the most widely used open framework and is easier to get into than other open stuff. If you are knowledgable about security and verification, doing hacking on e.g. CakeML [1] or CompCert [2] might be interesting.<p>A good way of being hired is to go to e.g. LLVM or GCC meetup, and make it clear that you are looking for a job.
Put it on your Github that you are looking for a job. Put a link to an LLVM or GCC (or similar) compiler phase that you have written. The next LLVM dev meeting is November 8-9 in San Jose, CA, hang out there, rest assured there will be many companies seeking to hire. Bonus points if you give a presentation, even if it's whimsy like compiling Brainfuck to Intel 4004 ... Another avenue is RISCV startups which are currently 10-a-penny, they all need and hire compiler engineers. Cold-contact them ...<p>PS, since you are a PhD student. I suggest finishing your PhD in some form or other. A lot of companies are loath to hire PhD students before they finish, or make the job offer contingent upon successful graduation. That certainly was our policy. If you are not yet near graduation, I suggest to do a compiler related internship.<p>[1] <a href="https://cakeml.org/" rel="nofollow">https://cakeml.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert</a>