Senior Title vs. Low Level Domain Pivot
I have a giant wall of text below ruminating on where to take my career. Full transparency the tldr was made using Gemini. Extra thank you for those that read the full context.
TL;DR: Currently hitting a learning ceiling in my internal tooling role. I’m faced with a choice: stay at a stable company to secure a Senior Engineer promotion and learn "AI Engineering," or jump to an early-stage robotics startup to bridge my knowledge gap in low-level engineering. I'm worried about leaving the promotion on the table, but I’m frustrated by my current workload and lack of technical alignment with my interests.
Full Post:
I’m a self taught Software Engineer. I started for two years at a startup and then transitioned to a high tier but not quite “FAANG” tech company. I currently still work there and have spent the last 4 years there. I work in an internal tooling team and have learned a lot! But I feel like I’m reaching the limit of what I can learn in my current team. Since I work in an internal tooling team, we do have a high scale system/service, but it was scaled before I had joined. Because it’s a large organization with devops and infra teams, I don’t have to get my hands dirty with kubernetes or GKE beyond very light debugging so I only have conceptual knowledge of them.
There are growth opportunities but not ones that I find personally interesting. There’s been a push to add LLMs to our recommendation systems, or make internal tooling agentic. This means a lot of infrastructure has to be built for example de-noising the LLMs, or managing its knowledge base to maintain relevant information within its context window, or caching/pre-generating LLM output so users don’t feel LLM latency.
What I actually find interesting and want to work on is low level programming! Ideally graphics programming. I also feel like low level programming is safer from the job insecurities AI has caused and has less of an overabundance of people pursuing these roles, but maybe that’s a misconception. Unfortunately due to me being self taught I lack the background with the necessary math and low level fundamentals to apply to roles I find interesting. I’ve been very slowly working through personal C++ projects in my spare time but not as fast as I’d like.
I want to move on to new pastures. I’ve applied to Google, Netflix, and Microsoft as these companies would improve my resume’s clout and would further my development. Given how competitive the job market is there’s a high likelihood I don’t even get an interview. I have fears that if I "leave the fold" I won't be able to make it back in. These roles also don’t get me lower on the stack like I desire to eventually.
Founders for a company I interned at managed to have their startup acquired and have started a new robotics startup that is gaining some traction. I’m considering reaching out and joining their startup as I will immediately be an asset with the skills I have along with giving me an opportunity to work in embedded engineering, robotics, and electrical engineering. It seems like a really good pivot point into the type of roles I want to grow into.
There is an argument to continue staying at my current job. The idea of being promoted to a senior engineer was floated to me last summer with the goal of getting it this summer. Unfortunately due to reorgs I have a new manager, and while he’s supportive of getting me promoted, I don’t think I’m going to get it this coming promotion cycle. It’ll feel really bad leaving my company without getting that Senior Engineer title on my resume. And there’s an argument that it's valuable for me to acquire domain expertise in the “AI Engineer” realm while it’s still early.
The alternative downside is I don’t want to be in the same place by the end of the year and due to a teammate departure my workload is going to increase significantly, if I don’t get promoted in 3 months I’m going to be incredibly frustrated, and promotions are mostly out of my managers hands after they recommend the powers that be to promote me.
I know that’s a lot of word vomit, thank you for reading all of it. What should I do?