I was good at DevOps. This isn't a story about escaping a job I hated. I spent five years as a DevSecOps engineer at two large financial services companies. I built things I was proud of. I learned a ton. I was respected by my team.
But somewhere around year four, something shifted. The work didn't change. I did. After five years, I made a change that surprised everyone who knew me: I left for a sales-adjacent role. Today, I'm one year into working as a Solutions Engineer at Infisical, and I want to share what I've learned. I think there are other DevOps engineers out there who might be feeling the same thing I felt, even if they can't quite name it yet.
What I Was Actually Missing
For a long time, I couldn't pinpoint what was wrong. The job was fine. I was good at it. But I started dreading the monotony of it all.
Part of it was repetition. My days had become predictable: check the dashboards, respond to tickets, debug whatever broke overnight, push some Terraform, go home. Maintain the HashiCorp Vault clusters, manage the secrets pipelines, answer the same support questions. Repeat. The work that used to feel engaging had become routine.
Part of it was stagnation. When I first started, I was learning constantly. Vault architecture, PKI fundamentals, secrets rotation, the politics of platform adoption in a large enterprise. But once I'd mastered the core toolset and codebase, the learning curve flattened. I wasn't being challenged anymore. I was just keeping things running.
And part of it was isolation. Most days, it was just me and my pipelines. My primary relationships were with CI/CD tools and YAML files. The humans I did interact with were usually frustrated. They needed something from me, or something I owned was blocking them. I missed working with people, not just unblocking them from behind a ticket queue.
I didn't have a word for what I was looking for. I just knew that what I was doing wasn't it anymore.
Discovering a Role I Didn't Know Existed
I had no idea Solutions Engineering was a real career path.
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