Title: Worried that joining a service company after a difficult phase may hurt my future opportunities
Hi everyone,
I have around 2.5 years of experience working mainly in Python backend, PySpark, and distributed systems.
I graduated in 2021 from a Tier 1.5 engineering college and worked for almost 2 years at a decent product-based company. After that, I went to the US for my Master’s and also did an 8-month internship there.
Unfortunately, things took a difficult turn personally. My mother was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, and I was not mentally in a good place to handle the stress of staying abroad and continuing the job search there. I decided to come back to India and spent a few months with my family.
During that period, I became very anxious about my growing career gap and took the first offer I received, which was from a service-based company. At that point, I mainly wanted stability and mental peace.
Now, after spending around 6 months here, I’ve realized that I want to move back toward stronger engineering roles. I also understood that I wasn’t sufficiently prepared in areas like:
- System Design
- DSA / LeetCode
- SDE-style interviews
So I’ve started preparing seriously for them.
However, I’m honestly very worried that:
- my current company may be seen as a downgrade
- my compensation may negatively affect recruiter perception
- spending more time here may make switching harder
I want to switch within the next few months into roles like:
- Backend Engineer
- SDE-Data
- Data Engineer / Data Platform
I would really appreciate honest advice from people who have gone through similar situations.
Some questions I have:
- Will recruiters strongly judge the move to a service company?
- How should I position this experience on my resume?
- Should I focus on backend/SDE roles or lean into data engineering?
- How long does it realistically take to recover momentum after a career disruption like this?
Would appreciate any practical guidance or similar experiences.
Thanks.