r/MachineLearning · · 2 min read

Roast my 3-year roadmap: Pivoting from Python/BaaS to AI Infrastructure & Go (Graduating 2029) [D]

Mirrored from r/MachineLearning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

I'm a B.Tech student in India graduating in mid-2029. Currently, I know Python, SQL, Docker, basic prompt engineering, and I've built a few LLM apps using BaaS like Supabase/Firebase. I’m running all this on an Intel i5 13th Gen laptop with an RTX 5050 (8GB VRAM).

The Pivot: I originally wanted to be a generic ML Engineer, but I've realized the entry-level market for Jupyter Notebook/Python scripters is insanely saturated. Plus, most companies are just calling OpenAI APIs anyway.

I want to pivot to the high-performance stuff: AI Backend / Distributed Systems Engineering. Instead of tuning the model, I want to be the guy building the infrastructure that serves the model to 10,000 users without the servers melting. My ultimate goal is top-tier Indian product companies (Zepto, Cred, etc.) or US remote startups.

My Proposed Roadmap: I am dropping the "easy" BaaS tools and going low-level. Here is my plan for the next couple of years:

  1. The Language Shift: Dropping Python for backend, going all-in on Go (Golang) to master concurrency and memory pointers.
  2. The Database Shift: Moving away from Supabase to raw PostgreSQL (via Docker), eventually learning to scale it, plus Redis for caching.
  3. The Hardware/AI Constraint: Running models locally on my RTX 5050 using Ollama/vLLM. Learning how to deal with VRAM limits using quantization, PagedAttention, etc., before eventually moving to cloud AWS/GCP.
  4. The Distributed Scale: Learning Kafka/RabbitMQ, Vector Databases (Milvus/Qdrant) at scale, and eventually wrapping it all in Kubernetes.

Basically, I want to build custom, high-throughput AI backends from scratch.

My Questions for the Seniors:

  1. Is this roadmap actually viable for a 2029 grad, or is the learning curve for Distributed Systems + AI Infrastructure too brutal to do alongside a college degree?
  2. Is betting heavily on Go the right move for this specific AI systems niche?
  3. What blind spots am I missing here?

Roast my plan. Be brutally honest!

submitted by /u/SinkClassic4450
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