Infrastructure engineering has evolved far beyond managing servers and spinning up cloud resources. Today, it’s about crafting resilient platforms, improving developer experience, and obsessing over user needs. That’s why I believe every infrastructure or production engineer should spend at least five years building backend applications before moving into infra roles.
Here’s why.
1. Code Quality and Developer Empathy
Working on backend products teaches you the fundamentals of writing clean, maintainable code. You develop a natural sensitivity to things like variable naming, code structure, and debugging workflows. More importantly, you learn how to think like the developers who will be your users in an infra role. This empathy helps you build tools that others actually want to use—not just ones that “work.”
2. UX Isn't Just for Designers
When you’ve been on the receiving end of poorly documented, overly complex internal tooling, you start to appreciate good UX—yes, even in infra. Backend experience wires your brain to care about latency, clarity, and consistency, not just uptime and throughput. It trains you to ask: Will this make someone’s life easier?
3. Avoiding Infra for Infra’s Sake
Without application experience, it’s easy to fall into the trap of building systems that are technically impressive but practically unusable. You end up with setups only infra teams understand—and nobody else wants to touch. A strong backend foundation keeps you grounded, reminding you that the goal isn’t to build fancy pipelines or run bleeding-edge stacks. The goal is to support real teams solving real problems.
Final Thoughts
Yes, infrastructure is fun. There’s joy in automation, orchestration, and performance tuning. But without first getting your hands dirty with backend development, you risk building solutions in a vacuum. Start with the app layer, feel the pain, and then go fix it with empathy and purpose.
That’s what makes a great infra engineer.
