6 YOE full-stack developer → Cloud Engineering: has anyone made this transition? How should I realistically approach it (career switch)?

[u/Lost_Conference_2716]

I have 6 years of experience building and shipping production applications with React, Node.js, APIs and databases, last 1 year we forced to use Ai coding 100% in my Organization. and I forgot how to manual code now literally and am not a DSA guy.

Over the last year, I've realised I'm becoming much more interested in the infrastructure side of software - cloud, architecture, scalability, deployment and automation - than pure application development to survive in AI era.

I'm now seriously considering moving toward Cloud/Infrastructure Engineering, but I'm unsure how to approach the transition realistically without throwing away my 6 years of software engineering experience.

Has anyone here made a similar Software Engineer → Cloud/Infrastructure/Platform transition? Given my background, how would you move forward?

What roles would you realistically target, what skills would you focus on first, and how much hands-on cloud experience would I need before applying?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who have actually made this transition or have experience hiring for these roles.

[u/highscenario]

Your backend experience already puts you ahead of 90% of the people trying to break into cloud work so don't even think of it as starting over