On my last day at Viki, I bought a cup of ice latte from the very cafe where my director spoke to me and tried to find out which team I would have fit best in. He proposed the SRE team since I had expressed a deep interest in performance and scaling infrastructure components. However, I politely declined as I preferred to build up “proper” foundation as an SWE by building components of a distributed system.
Outcome? I was given the role of SWE in the multimedia team and proceeded to do just that over the next ~2.5 years, building components to support a playback architecture which was distributed(available) and robust to failures.
Thinking back, I wondered if I had taken the SRE role, would I have taken up my offer at my next gig in their platform infrastructure team.