Needing some advice on switching to a completely different area

Question

I don't want my company here because I'm pretty sure my employer will be able to track me down, but I'm on the identity and access management team at a large e-commerce firm. I keep getting this sinking feeling with all the new job titles that are coming up as a result of AI, that I'm in a dead-end area. It's not really security engineering work, it's the bridge between the backend and security where we implement oauth, oidc, saml, passkeys, and few of the other MFA specs. I joined the team a few months ago after getting pretty bored with product engineering work (making some Graphql APIs).

Ultimately, I'm a software engineer, but not good enough or knowledgeable enough to be in security engineering. What bothers me though is that enough of a niche to switch to other companies?

A lot of postings require knowledge of k8s, CUDA because of the AI boom. I'm very early in my career and quite lost right now looking at the jobs out there. Can anyone chime in?

Charlie Vuong · Accepted Answer

I actually would think that the bridging between security and backend is a role where a company wouldn't want to outsource completely because the tail risk is so high if anything does go wrong. The work where you do have to patch up very custom solutions based on your company's architecture can be more difficult to hand wave away to AI. I do think that AI is more of an amplifier and a tool rather than being able to completely replace an engineer.

Based on your current role, do you find yourself being more interested in security or backend work? If so, it could be worth it to invest more time into one of those areas.

Needing some advice on switching to a completely different area

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