The struggle to stand out

This post is a continuation of a previous one where I talked about my career path, and how I struggle to market myself even though I’ve got some hardcore working experience.

Experience I accumulated

I have always worked with data since my very first job. The second job was coincidentally related, and it was like continuing from where I left off, specializing further. But what was I specializing in? What exactly did I do in both jobs?

DevOps: At my first job, the tech was outdated and everything was manual — no Docker, no automation. I set up the dev environment from scratch, managed deployments by SSH-ing into servers, wrote Jenkins pipelines, and installed Kafka clusters by hand. It was more Ops than DevOps. My second job was a big step up: small company, but modern stack with GitLab, Kubernetes, and ArgoCD. I took ownership of the infra again, but this time with proper GitOps workflows.

Data Engineering: In both jobs I touched on data engineering. I worked with data, but in a greater extend, I worked around data. The tooling and infrastructure around the data was what I was best at and what my role demanded. I learned a lot about machine learning and integrated tools like MLFlow in solutions.

Heavy Backend Development: Along the lines, and especially in my second job, I did some hardcore backend programming. Building complex APIs, and working with greenfield libraries spanning dozens of repos with dependencies upon each other.

An match made in heaven

Recently I realized that what I have been doing for my whole career has a name, and is actually both very much in need and quite a niche. This made me confident for the first time that my work experience has produced marketable skills. The magic equation is:

DevOps + Data Engineering = Data Infrastructure Engineering

Basically I build the tools and platforms that data scientists and data engineers use. I make the infrastucture needed for working with data. This is extremely valuable, and marketing myself in this was automatically positions me in a very good spot in the market!