I’m a Senior Software Engineer looking to break into management and there is a build/infrastructure engineer position available that may allow me to do this. Is this a good path forward in my career as a software engineer, or would this be a poor long term move for my career? Would moving out of this position and back to “traditional” software engineering be difficult? What is the view of build/infrastructure engineers inside of FANG companies?
Do not do it. These jobs can be easily automated or outsourced.
What is scope of this job?
It’s listed as a Senior or Staff level job (in Pandora) asking for 10+ years of engineering experience. It has expectations of setting up continuous integration and static analysis tools.
Here is the posting: https://pandora.com/careers/position?id=o7WQ5fwI
Do you want to wake up 3am every fucking morning to investigate a rogue server only to see some dumbass has forgotten to enable log rotation and the box is out of disk space, for the foreseeable future ahead? Then be my guest. (Air quotes) “automation”, “elastic scaling”, “ci”, “pushbutton deployment”s are all virtual realities (or screensavers to lure you into the job) Except for google, everybody else’s infrastructure is a complete and utter fuckup (hence the increasing demand in operations/infra engineers) Repeat after me; “It’s a trap.”
It is entirely dependent on the opportunity. Are you the first infrastructure/build engineer? How quickly are they looking to build the team? What is your managers vision for the team and how much freedom will you have to set the vision? Answering these will tell you if they are looking for a leader or just an engineer
Absolutely not. Don’t even touch with a 10 feet pole.
Depends. If you are actual hired into an infra role where you are overseeing and improving infra automation in the cloud or DC go for it. Whatever anyone thinks about the future high skilled people who know how to do bare metal automation will be in demand. It is also super rewarding when you build something from the ground up that you can press several buttons and have a full scale production infra ready. However most infra jobs are horse shit and little more than On call monkeys who read vendor documentation and make tiny changes to systems.
Nah most build infra tools jobs are shit.
Do you like dealing with angry engineers?
Hell No! I made that mistake and it was quite hard to resurrect my career.