u/Diligent_Clothes_895

I am currently building a central "Cluster-as-a-Service" platform nd deal with automated cluster provisioning, multi-tenant setup, observability work, kubernetes security etc. I also contribute upstream to K8s-sigs. The company I work for is rather unknown and I would love to be at a bigger brand with a real engineering culture. (I have gotten a few faang interviews in the last month, but declined one myself and did not get more offers).

I now have an offer at a well-known fintech where I would work on owning CI/CD pipeline templates (GitHub Actions/Jenkins), and some more terraform templates plus policy work. Dev teams manage their own infra/CI-CD day-to-day, the team has no direct Kubernetes/Linux/scaling ownership and everything's serverless. However it is a well-known tech brand and I would get 35% more salary (which bumps my salary to slightly above market, not much tho).

My worry: My long-term goal is deep infra/platform roles (K8s internals, distributed systems, SRE-adjacent work). I'm concerned 1-2 years here erodes my skills in that area and I navigate myself into a build tooling and devex niche? What is your take on that move? Would I limit myself too much or can I easily move back to infra platform work later, i.e., would owning CI/CD/tooling be seen as equivalent experience to K8s internals, distributed systems, and observability work when I try to move back later?

I am currently building a central Kubernetes Platform where teams can provision clusters to run their workloads on. I am quite exposed to the Kubernetes ecosystem and also contribute to k8s myself. Apart from that I deal with observability topics. However we own the whole platform as one team and everybody does a bit of everything.
I now have an offer from a great brand. The team provision and own dev tooling companywide, like CI/CD pipelines, security scanning and OPA policy automation. They run this on serverless functions. So I would not deal with kubernetes / linux and scaling concerns anymore. One huge advantage is a 40% salary bump and the company is a nice brand on the CV, I could leverage for my further trajectory.

However I wonder if I would be able to move back to what I am currently doing, as I see myself long term in an infra role. Moreover, independent of salary, what do you believe as a more valuable "skill"? Developer platform vs infra / runtime platform work? I feel that many top-tier tech companies are looking for people that have done what I am doing now and not what the new role offers.