Infrastructure
first. Always.
I started in 2007 managing Oracle databases for defense clients — environments where a bad query plan or a failed backup had real, sometimes irreversible consequences. That's not where most cloud engineers start, and it shaped how I think about systems in ways that are hard to unlearn.
From there I spent close to a decade at Viper Technology building and operating enterprise AWS infrastructure for government and commercial workloads. VPCs, IAM, EC2 fleets, RDS clusters at scale. I wasn't reading about these things — I was the person on call when they broke.
At Zolon Tech I moved into senior infrastructure architecture. Multi-account AWS landing zones, EKS clusters, GitOps delivery pipelines, zero-downtime cloud migrations. The work became more complex and the stakes were higher, but the discipline was the same: build it so it doesn't break, and when it does, fix it faster than anyone notices.
The AI infrastructure work I do now isn't a career change — it's the same foundation applied to a harder problem. LLM systems have all the failure modes of distributed systems, plus a whole new class of problems that most engineers haven't seen yet. Production scars help.