[HN Gopher] I spent 5 years in DevOps - Solutions engineering ga...
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I spent 5 years in DevOps - Solutions engineering gave me what I
was missing
Author : vmatsiiako
Score : 59 points
Date : 2026-02-06 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (infisical.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (infisical.com)
| ikjasdlk2234 wrote:
| My path went from engineering-aligned (math) to engineering
| management back to engineering to product to program management
| to solutions engineering to account executive.
|
| Honestly I had a negative connotation about sales for most of my
| career, but turns out I really love it. The exposure to different
| problems every day is awesome and more like a puzzle than work to
| me. I feel a bit of reverse imposter syndrome though, like I
| should feel bad that I didn't "make it" as a real engineer. So
| that's a weird feeling.
|
| One thing I try to do in my company is pull engineers into sales
| calls and proofs-of-concepts if I can. I think that exposure to
| both real users and unique environments is important for their
| growth and novelty in the job.
| esafak wrote:
| Can you share one such puzzle?
| marcyb5st wrote:
| I am a solution engineer mostly on the traditional ML side of
| things but have good knowledge of K8S/GKE. The most fun I had
| last year was helping a customer serve their models at scale.
| They thought it was cost prohibitive (500k inferences/second
| and a hard requirement of 7ms at p99) and so they were
| basically serving from a cache which was lossy (the
| combinatorial explosion of features made it so that to have
| full coverage you needed exabytes of ram) and was stale
| prone. We focused on the serving first. After their data
| scientists trained a New pytorch model (small one, 50k
| parameters more or less) we compiled to onnx (as the model is
| small and CPU inference is actually faster), grafted the
| preprocessing layers to the model so that you never leave the
| ONNX C++ runtime (to avoid python), and deployed it to GKE. A
| 8 core node using AMD genoa cpus managed to get
| 25k/inferences per second. After a bit of fiddling with Numa
| affinity, GKE DNS replication, Triton LRU caches and few
| other things we managed to hit 30k inferences per second. If
| you scale up to the traffic it would cost them few thousands
| per month, which is less than their original cache approach.
|
| Now they are working on continuous learning so that they can
| roll out new model (it is a very adversarial line of business
| and the models get stale in O(hours)). For that part I only
| helped them design the thing, no hands on. It was a super fun
| engagement TBH
| falloutx wrote:
| Sales is amazing but if your companies sales people require
| engineering to build POCs a lot of the times or always have to
| sell some custom solutions, then it wastes a lot of resources
| and it usually indicates the company is losing product market
| fit.
| ikjasdlk2234 wrote:
| That is true. My current work is in bespoke environments with
| mainly non-technical buyers who have been burned in the past.
| Our POCs are pretty minor lifts to build credibility and have
| worked extremely well.
|
| If you're working in SaaS or commodity products and have to
| run POCs a lot, you're totally correct.
| grvdrm wrote:
| I love hearing this.
|
| My story: mostly business analytics (2005-2022), sales
| engineering, sales (both at same tech start up), and now
| running a solo consulting business.
|
| I also really liked sales. Updating a CRM, not so much. But
| sales allowed me to spend my day talking with people about
| problems. No day the same, and lots of focus on finding
| different/better ways to communicate.
|
| In what industries did these roles happen? Same industry/domain
| or have you changed that as well?
| codezero wrote:
| I really loathe that sales engineers stole the term Solutions
| Engineer which was previously used to basically mean
| support/services engineer (technical generalist), a mostly post-
| sales role. It's pedantic, but I watched it happen in real time,
| my company's HR even asked if we could change our team titles to
| help out the sales team since they wanted the more appealing
| title to use.
|
| The reason it annoys me so much is that it makes it harder to
| find post-sales technical generalists as the top of the funnel
| ends up filled with pre-sales people.
|
| Congrats to OP for finding something they like though!
| axus wrote:
| It's always nice when the customer wants to improve the
| process/product, it can overcome internal friction that had
| prevented making things better.
| maxaw wrote:
| Wow, I think I'd love this job. Nothing more interesting than
| learning about lots of different unique problems from different
| industries. And totally get the fear of losing technical edge
| vmatsiiako wrote:
| Apply here :) -
| https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/infisical/2ef2e211-9332-4e68-bd86-e...
| -
| https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/infisical/73b79555-8b3f-486b-84fa-8...
| lateral_cloud wrote:
| Best job in the world.
| pisipisipisi wrote:
| My experience in a "product company" - Pre-sales solutions
| engineer - the original problem solver. Professional services -
| post-sales firefighter :)
| korijn wrote:
| Inspiring article. Well written. Totally feeling it!
| nickjj wrote:
| I'd still classify what they're doing as DevOps type of work. It
| just happens to be a wider spectrum of things vs their usual
| "write YAML" in that 1 role. Sounds like the original poster
| found a more enjoyable role with the same title?
|
| I do a ton of different things every day and have been for the
| last ~10 years, all in the neighborhood of DevOps'ish type of
| tasks. I've written about 120+ of those tasks at
| https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/120-skills-i-use-in-an-sre-pl....
| I do agree, it is fun to mix it up in your day to day (IMO).
| NoSalt wrote:
| I am a software developer. I went to college to learn software
| development. Two years ago, they tried to tack DevOps on to my
| job description. I told them "no thanks", then had to find
| another job. I found one and am MUCH happier not having to do
| that DevOps crap. No offense, but it a soul-draining undertaking,
| and I like writing code ... ONLY!
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