u/Away-Resolve787

Hey everyone,

I’ve been a backend/systems dev for about 3+ years now. My background is mostly heavy infrastructure stuff—Kafka, NATS, ScyllaDB, MySQL, and Postgres. Currently, I’m actually knee-deep in a migration of 1,000+ tables from CockroachDB to Postgres using Kafka CDC, so I’m used to high-scale, "messy" production environments.
For the last 1.5 years, I’ve been using Rust professionally at my current company. I’ve completely fallen for the language and the ecosystem—I even spend my free time building Rust tools, like an open-source html to typst parser I recently published.

The problem is, I’m trying to move into a 100% Rust role, and I’m hitting a massive wall.

It feels like every posting I find is either:

1. The "5+ years of Rust" unicorn: Which feels like a huge ask for a language that only recently went mainstream in the enterprise.

2. Web3/Crypto: I have zero interest in this space. I want to build distributed systems, CLI tools, or infra.

I’m starting to get ghosted or rejected because I don’t have that "5 years" mark, even though I have solid systems experience and 1.5 years of actual production Rust.

I’m curious:

• For those of you who hire for Rust teams: Does 1.5 years of professional Rust plus a strong systems background (Kafka/Scylla/K8s) actually get me a look? Or is the 5-year filter usually a hard "no"?

• How do you guys find the "normal" backend roles that aren't crypto? Are there specific job boards or Discord servers that are better than the LinkedIn noise?

• Should I be focusing more on my open-source stuff to "prove" I know the language, or does the professional experience carry more weight?

Would love a reality check or any advice from people who’ve made the jump recently. Thanks!