Career Path and Role Differences: Enterprise Systems Engineer vs Software Engineer - Infrastructure at Meta

I believe Enterprise Systems Engineer is the same as "Enterprise Engineer"? Can you confirm? This reddit post explains it well:

If you are an Enterprise Engineer, you spend time developing internal tools for FB employees. It can be a simple full stack website for employees to sign up for benefits, claim some benefits, or sth like that.

Enterprise Engineering is the "lite" version of Software Engineer in terms of being less technical: fewer production issues, far fewer users, and less gnarly technical challenges. As a result, EE will get paid less and will be viewed as the "younger sibling" to a normal SWE job.

You'll also have less optionality in the Enterprise Engineering role, since there are fewer of those roles available, and you'd need to re-interview for Software Engineering. All else being equal, I'd definitely prefer the Infrastructure SWE role.

In terms of exit opportunities, though, the EE role is a great option! If you have been trying to break into FAANG, this could be a great option. You will be a full-on Meta employee, develop your network, and you still can obfuscate whether you were an Enterprise Engineer or Software Engineer for your next job.

Enterprise Engineering is also likely going to be better in terms of work-life balance.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about the Enterprise Systems Engineer role. Even after Googling for it and looking on levels.fyi, I don't fully understand what it does and how the career path is different from SWE.

So my main concern is how this engineering vertical relates to "traditional" Meta SWE. At Meta, there are roles that have "Engineer" in them but are on a different path/pay grade compared to SWE. For example, there is a "Solutions Engineer" role that is effectively a support engineer for big advertisers (I knew people on that track). The salary is around the same, but the stock is like 50% - 75% lower. As you get to E5, RSUs become most of your TC, so this really hurts over time. Since this engineering track is "lower" than SWE, Meta Solutions Engineers effectively need to go through the entire interview loop to transition into SWE.

If I plan to transition to a Software Engineer or Machine Learning Engineer role at Meta after a few years, is that possible internally?

It definitely is (Meta has good internal mobility), but you need to figure out how "close" it is to those roles. I would ask your recruiter what the difference is between Enterprise Systems Engineer and SWE/MLE, specifically about compensation. If the pay bands are around the same, it should be considered level to the "traditional" engineering roles at Meta and transitioning should be far easier.

Also, MLE will be trickier as it's a narrower domain with higher barrier to entry concerning expertise. You might need to switch to SWE first, work in an ML-specific domain, and then switch to MLE. Check out my advice here on domain switches: "How to transition from back-end development to distributed systems?"