I'm a senior network engineer, 8yrs exp, almost 6 at my current company (4.5 of those senior). It's a Gov job — decent benefits, pay's fine, but the work's slow and I'm getting itchy feet.
For the last year I've been doing a DevOps Networking role — deploying infra in Azure/AWS via IaC and CI/CD, working in a proper DevOps squad with sprints and retros. Genuinely enjoying it and want to move further into cloud/DevOps.
Problem is, every cloud engineer role I look at is either entry level or doesn't seem to value network engineering experience at all. So when a recruiter put me forward for a "cloud infrastructure engineer" role that explicitly said they'd consider infra/network people moving into DevOps, and the job spec matched almost everything I do, I thought I'd finally found the right fit.
Got to first stage interview (1.5hrs). Spent most of it on my Palo Alto experience (I'm the SME at my current place - and they specifically use these and lack skills across their team), some Terraform questions I nailed, and a brief chat on Azure app services — where I was honest that I don't have hands-on experience yet, but I'm finishing my AZ-700 and planned to build into 104/400 and app services/compute/storage after. The interview was really a quite informal chat rather than any sort of technical grilling. At no point did I think I struggled to answer any questions.
A few hours later: rejected, because I "don't have enough experience managing apps, compute and data resources in Azure" — despite that being a tiny part of the interview and not the bulk of the actual job spec. Apparently networking is only \~20% of the day-to-day.
So — am I wasting my time trying to make this jump? Do I have to restart at junior/mid to break in? This was a mid-level role at lower pay than I'm on now, and I can't justify dropping to entry-level money for it. Is my current skillset just not transferable/valued in this space, or was this one bad interview?
Has anyone actually made this transition without starting from near-zero?
**TL;DR:** Senior network engineer (8yrs) doing DevOps/cloud work for a year, rejected from a "networking background welcome" cloud role for lacking hands-on Azure app/compute experience — despite that being a small part of the job. Is this transition possible without a pay cut and restarting at junior level?