You don't try to get promoted in engineering. You do a kickass job, and those above you notice and promote you or at least give you a raise/bonus.
Now that sounds naive, but the reason this works is because you are actually in power. You can easily find another job granting you more pay, especially with something like Google on your resume.
In my 20+ years of software development I've never asked for or even pursued a promotion. If the job wasn't taking care of me, I went elsewhere with a nice 20% raise.
I'm glad that this has worked for you but it's not like that for everyone. Also it's very stupid in many ways that people constantly just have to jump ship to get a raise. I might really love my work, be learning a lot, work with great people, but I have to fight tooth and nail to get a raise -or- waste a bunch of my time constantly talking to new companies. And then my current company loses someone with a lot of domain knowledge too. I love programming. I really do wish I could just sit down and code. Companies are always talking about wringing out the last drops of productivity but they don't reward programmers for focusing on code, but instead the business side of things and constantly jumping ship.
I play the game like most people do, of course. But it's a stupid game.
Now that sounds naive, but the reason this works is because you are actually in power. You can easily find another job granting you more pay, especially with something like Google on your resume.
In my 20+ years of software development I've never asked for or even pursued a promotion. If the job wasn't taking care of me, I went elsewhere with a nice 20% raise.