DevOps/Platform Engineering vs SDE – what should I do?
During college I loved creating backend systems, building a full stack student portal, APIs, clean architecture. I got placed through campus hiring based on dev skills, but was assigned to a DevOps team instead.
For 2 years I've worked on AWS infra: EC2, Aurora, IAM, Terraform, Jenkins. Legitimate experience, but narrow, no Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Prometheus/Grafana in daily use.
The dilemma: I keep being told Platform Engineering is the "best of both worlds," combining infra and software skills. But the more I dig into it, the more it feels like infra work with occasional coding, not the systems-building-with-clean-architecture work I actually loved doing before this job. I don't want to just provision resources, I want to build things. If it around provisioning resources that's fine, like building a tool like Terraform
I also hold an AWS MLOps cert (as my company's AI strategy 🤦), but no applied ML engineering experience.
“It feels like my career stalled before it started, and I don't forgive my first company for that, but I'm grateful that I got my first job
What I need honest opinions on:
- Is my read on Platform Engineering fair, or am I misjudging it?
- Should I pivot toward Software/Backend Engineering despite having zero professional dev experience (except during internships and side projects), or is that too big a risk to leave 2 years of so called "infra experience" behind?
- Is "keep the DevOps job, build backend depth on the side for 6 months, then test the market" a sound plan, or naive?
- What am I not seeing here that someone further along this path would tell me?
- Am I naive to think that Development would be better than DevOps, since I hear things like DevOps/SRE jobs have high demand.
Trying to avoid both naivety and overthinking. Direct feedback welcome, tell me if I'm wrong about something.