[potta_coffee]

I was working at smaller companies and I crossed over into cloud and infrastructure incrementally by necessity. So at one company, I was managing a team of developers who were all decent at web development, but the company mandated that we take a number of disparate products they'd bought from other companies, running on mostly on-location and migrate all to the cloud. Since there weren't any cloud engineers around, this work fell to me.

After getting some hands-on experience with this type of work, I found a job at a managed services company that had lots of AWS expertise, but really didn't have any good programmers working for them. Since the company wasn't really a software company, they neglected programming skills in the interview process, but then found themselves in need of more development horsepower. While there, I ended up building internal tools and APIs that smoothed over some gaps not covered by the myriad 3rd party solutions they were cobbling together, and also build APIs over some janky ad-hoc Lambda based processes they'd built.

After a year at that company, I was able to land a better gig at a company as a "senior cloud engineer". What clinched this role for me was also programming ability. It seems like a lot of "cloud" teams are composed of former operations guys that seem to hit a brick wall when they come to certain tasks, and I'm pretty good at bridging that gap, and that's how I sell myself.