Support Engineer role in distributed systems / analytics infra - how is this path viewed long term?
Posted by NerfLongshotUV@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 1 comments
Hey folks, I need some advice from people working in infra/platform/data systems.
I’m a backend engineer with \~3 YOE and most of my experience has been around Kafka, ClickHouse, telemetry pipelines, K8s, distributed systems etc.
I recently got an opportunity for a Support Engineer role focused on:
- production debugging/support
- helping customers with architecture/design
- query + ingestion optimization
- ClickHouse/Kafka/K8s work
- some OSS/community interaction
The role pays significantly better than typical SWE roles I’m currently getting, which is a big factor too.
The stack honestly sounds pretty interesting and technical, but I’m trying to understand how this kind of experience is viewed long term.
Does this still set you up well for strong backend/platform/data infra roles later? Or does it become hard to move back toward more traditional SWE roles after a while?
Would love honest opinions from people who’ve worked in infra/platform/SRE/data engineering type roles.
TheAbsentMindedCoder@reddit
Completely depends how you sell it. What projects are you working on? How is it enabling business ($$$)? Every dev shop is different. Not for a bunch of randoms on the internet to decide.