I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

Hi, the lines are blurring a little bit. DevOps (which I'll call cloud architecture in this response) and SRE used to be a little more separate roles, and while they still are, with the shift to cloud services more companies are placing them all together in the big "software engineer" pool. It used to be back in the day that DevOps would be running scripts on proprietary machines and running around hooking up wires. Now DevOps is like writing complex software to manage generic cloud infra, like AWS, GCC, Azure, etc... So even if some companies don't call that "software engineer" there's a big and competitive market for this role. You absolutely get exposure to large scale systems and the transition to designing those systems is much smaller than other jumps. You might even find that you are already doing all the right things day to day but might just be missing the theory of why. And you definitely have some stories to tell in interviews! To summarize the marketplace: all of those roles are in demand. DevOps and Infra/architecture are very in demand, and so are general broad SWE roles. If you do want to transition for interest-sake, look at a company where DevOps is under the same umbrella as SWE, start there, and slowly take on SWE-like work.