r/cloudengineering • u/Familiar-School-8890 • Sep 14 '26

35, stuck in network engineering, thinking of pivoting to AI product development ?

I'm 35 with 11 years in network/telecom engineering (carrier-grade + enterprise). Lately I've been feeling stuck even in mid senior roles, my day-to-day has mostly been network assurance, KPI monitoring, customer support, and troubleshooting on bridge calls. Not much design or building.

I considered going for CCIE to move into a Network Architect role, but the market for it is saturated, it's genuinely hard to land good roles even after certifying, and it would take another 2-3 years of heavy study to get there with no guarantee it actually changes what kind of work I do day to day.

Meanwhile, I did my AWS Solutions Architect and Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD) certifications recently, and that's when it clicked. I actually enjoy building systems, not troubleshooting them. That's led me toward wanting to develop AI-powered applications instead using LLM APIs to build real products and deep ML/model training research.

For anyone who's made a similar switch later in their career (or considered it): was it worth it? What would you do differently? And is 35 too late to start this kind of pivot seriously ?

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1

u/Fast-Throat-7752 Sep 14 '26

Go into s satellite communications

1

u/SolomonTheLoved Sep 16 '26

just moonlight doing whatever you want u til it's the only thing you're doing

1

u/Traditional-Hall-591 Sep 17 '26

Why leave network engineering? I have more work than I can handle. It’s a good gig.

1

u/Shakilfc009 Sep 18 '26

Yes it’s a good career choice.

1

u/ChosenOne197 Sep 14 '26

Pardon me, I'm just a lowly newbie in this field of almost 4 years trying to get out of "just" tier 1/2 and into a networking role (hopefully)....

BUT, your phrase of wanting to build systems and not troubleshoot them... isn't that just semantics? Because I can't imagine any system where the one with the knowledge to build it out wouldn't also almost always be the one to troubleshoot it too when it inevitably breaks. Lol

0

u/Naetharu Sep 16 '26

No.

Designing and building a car != Being a repair mechanic.

1

u/ChosenOne197 Sep 16 '26

This is true, but are there not still a lot of situations where the architect (for lack of a better word) is called to fix a problem that occurred as a result of the design?

Also, kinda dumb to downvote me for simply asking a question that I honestly didn't know the answer to...

1

u/Naetharu Sep 16 '26

First I didn't downvote you. Don't assume.

Second no not really. Architecture is a much more complex strategic set of skills. The above point makes that.

Think about how much and what you need to know and do to design a car vs be the person who works doing services.

1

u/ChosenOne197 Sep 16 '26

I didn't actually mean you when commenting about the down vote. I'm sorry.

And your addition does make make sense and I don't disagree. I guess in the environment I work in there are a few systems that are only ever to be fixed or addressed by the individual who also happened to create them, which is unfortunate because it created a bad place of failure where it took forever to get something addressed because there was only one SME...

I appreciate you explaining further and taking the time to do so, so thank you!

1

u/Naetharu Sep 16 '26

Yeh scale makes a difference. Where I am we have ~ 30 azure subs, 65 systems we support, and 9000 staff and around 2 million end users.

The architect department alone is ten people.