Quick background about myself. I graduated university last year and now work at a multinational Telco as a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer (aka TelcoCloud) Basically I'm a delivery boy for software. The job is solid, great pay supportive team, and i'm performing relatively well according to my colleagues.

The catch? The stakes are insanely high. One mistake could take down a data center or fry expensive hardware. I'm still early in my career so switching jobs wouldn't be too hard.

Before this I spent a year as a web developer (backend, java) and eight months as a DevOps (CI/CD monkey with some code reviews thanks to my dev experience)

Here are my questions:

Should I stick with this high-risk TelcoCloud role or jump back to software engineering for potentially less pay but way less risk?

Why do people choose these highstakes jobs when software engineering seems safer and pays similarly?

I'm confident I can thrive in either role but I'm unsure about switching given the 2025 job market AI automation and other uncertainties. One upside of my current job is that the skill set is super niche and tough to automate.

PS. Honestly my career's been a string of fortunate flukes. I never aimed for TelcoCloud, it is just something that pays better than my previous job. Back in uni, I was set on becoming a Software Architect down the line,... or become a COBOL Dev :)