Ask HN: Moving into contracting/consulting as a backend engineer
lately I've been thinking about moving into contracting/consulting instead of regular employment. However, it feels like as a backend engineer it's not so clear cut how you should market yourself. Compared to say iOS/Android or React developers, which generally have very clear-cut responsibilities and outcomes.
I have about ~7 years experience broadly doing data engineering and service development in various languages (Python, Go, Scala, Elixir). I've also worked on building and maintaining ML pipelines for inference in product features. Crucially, I have little to no experience building frontends.
I think in general it can be broken down into:
- Define API contracts (SDK, HTTP, Events, whatever is appropriate)
- Implement business logic, data validation, authnz etc.
- Chose appropriate data storage layers (PG, Redshift, Redis, Elasticsearch etc.) and define schemas. Work on optimisations to storage or querying logic.
- Manage async workloads
- Implement monitoring, metrics etc.
- Some basic infrastructure work (CDK, Terraform)
Has anyone here with a similar skillset made the jump into consulting? Two avenues I am thinking of:
- Double down on the data engineering part
- Try to become a domain expert in the industry I am currently in