I worked in IT from 2012 to 2015, spending about two years on a help desk and one year as a systems administrator for a post-production company. I left after my hours increased, including weekends, without additional pay, and moved into carpet fitting, which paid better at the time. For the past five years I've run my own SaaS business, where I've built substantial experience with Linux, Python, Docker, EKS, CI/CD, Jenkins, Nginx, Terraform, APIs, Stripe, and automated customer deployments. I've also maintained around 3,500 containers with high availability and hold an AWS Solutions Architect certification. I'm considering returning to full-time IT, ideally in a DevOps, cloud, systems engineering, or software-focused role. Is that realistic, and how should I present my experience after being away from traditional IT for so long?
4 Answers
Your biggest challenge may be explaining the career path, not proving that you can do the work. Build a small public portfolio with architecture diagrams, sanitized deployment examples, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD configurations, and documentation. Be clear that you left traditional employment to build and operate a production SaaS platform, then explain why you now want a stable team environment. That sounds much stronger than presenting yourself as someone trying to restart from the beginning.
Keep your current work going while you search. The market is difficult even for people with recent experience, so don’t assume applications will move quickly. You may need to target systems engineer, cloud operations, platform engineer, or senior sysadmin roles rather than only jobs titled DevOps. Government and public-sector employers can also be worth checking directly because many of their vacancies never appear on the major job boards.
Don’t let the gloomy replies convince you that the entire field is finished. Technology careers have rough periods, but there are still many different paths. Refresh the areas that have changed since your earlier IT experience, practice interviewing, and apply broadly enough to learn what employers are responding to. Also avoid framing users or coworkers as idiots—communication, patience, and humility matter a lot in infrastructure work. You can be highly technical without sounding dismissive.
A useful mindset is remembering that everyone has gaps, including experienced engineers. Be confident about what you’ve built while being honest about the areas you need to update.
DevOps is usually a fairly senior role because employers expect a combination of systems administration, networking, cloud platforms, security, automation, and software engineering practices. Your SaaS work could absolutely count, but you need to make the infrastructure and operational side obvious instead of describing it vaguely as “running a SaaS.” Put concrete achievements on your résumé: scale, uptime, deployment automation, incident response, cost savings, migrations, and the tools you used.
The SaaS has involved managing thousands of Docker containers on EKS, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform-based deployments, APIs, Linux, Python, and Nginx. I’ll focus on those measurable responsibilities rather than just calling myself a founder.
A portfolio is especially useful if the company itself isn’t widely known. Hiring managers need a quick way to see that this was real production engineering rather than a side project or a few tutorials.