Currently making ~$300k/year in total comp.

31 years old. 5 years of experience as a hardware engineer, and 2 years as a software engineer (back-end).

Master's degree from Stanford.

Practice hackerrank, cracking-the-coding-interview, read a programming/architecture book every few months, till you can ace programming interviews and understand your field really well.

Living in NYC, where the financial companies have driven comp levels really high for software-engineers.

Working at a big-4 software company.

Currently at my 4th company. Interview and negotiate aggressively at many different places every time you switch, so you can get 20-40% increases.

Don't know how much this helped me, but do a side-project and blog about your experiences.