Perhaps consider applying to one of the companies building ecosystem tooling around Kubernetes or other schedulers? Your at-scale operational knowledge will be invaluable - it's something many people do not have.

Actual in-the-trenches experience of distributed systems at scale is fairly rare. Anything that helped you acquire that while being paid is likely not wasted!

An idea: work on something that will help other people to never have to learn what you had to learn about k8s.

> software that people used

I’m assuming by this you mean non-technical people.

It feels like if you can handle the chaos, an early-stage startup is the way to go for you. A single developer can significantly contribute to product discussions and infra platform decisions simultaneously.

Perhaps also look into positions outside of traditional tech? Med-tech, green-tech, etc are all in desperate need of infra experience, but tend to not have siloed roles like tech-tech has.