Am I cooked?
Background:
Did about 3 years as an SRE before jumping into Sales Engineering. The SE role clicked for me. I loved the customer-facing technical work, demos, translating engineering concepts for buyers. Role got cut roughly 5 months in. Not performance, but 5 months on the resume looks rough no matter how you frame it.
Searched hard for another SE role in my area. Didn't want to relocate, didn't want to bounce back to engineering. To bridge the gap, I picked up an AI evaluation 2 month contract. Here I was designing and running evals on model performance against real infrastructure data.
When the contract wrapped and SE roles still weren't landing, I took an SDR gig to keep momentum in sales rather than let the transition stall out. Hit 200% of quota during ramp. The technical background has actually been beneficial as I work heavily in Openclaw and Claude Code which translates to strategically grinding the pipeline.
My background skews heavily toward observability (SRE years) and voice AI (current focus). That combo feels like a decent wedge for SE roles at the right companies: observability vendors, CPaaS/voice AI platforms, anything where the buyer is a platform/DevOps/engineering leader and technical credibility actually moves deals.
Trying to figure out the realistic path and timeline back to SE from here. Anyone been through a similar SE → layoff → contract → SDR → SE loop? What worked?
TLDR:
After 3 years as an SRE in observability, I moved into Sales Engineering, was let go around the 5 month mark, worked an AI evaluation contract while searching, and eventually took an SDR role where I'm now at 200% of quota during ramp. My specialty is observability and voice AI, and I'm trying to figure out the realistic path and timeline back to SE from an SDR seat.