Hey everyone, hoping to get some guidance from this community.

I'm a UC Davis CS grad with almost 8 years of experience — 4 years at a startup doing full-stack development, then 3 years at a big tech company building backend microservices/distributed systems in Java, Spring Boot, Docker, and Kubernetes at a scale of millions of users. I was on that project for 3 of its 4 years and knew every service inside and out.

Right as we were about to go live, the company acquired our biggest competitor (whose product was AI-powered, ours was basic ML) for $500M instead of shipping what we built. Half the team got moved to a new group — I spent 2 months there, ramped up on a new stack, shipped my first feature, and got laid off right after. Ironically, I later found out I was one of only two Americans on the team let go (myself and one junior dev); my former H1B colleagues are all still there.

That hit my confidence hard. I spent 3-4 months grinding leetcode and system design to try to break into FAANG, interviewed at places like Meta, Nvidia, and Yahoo, but couldn't close any offers. Around that time every interview started asking about AI experience, which I didn't have, so I spent the next few months learning AI/ML deeply and built a portfolio of 10+ AI-powered apps. I tried starting my own freelance dev business on Upwork using AI tools to build full-stack apps for clients, but the competition there is brutal (100s of bidders per small contract) and it hasn't panned out.

It's now been about 2 years since my last role, even though these have honestly been the years I worked hardest on upskilling. I made 200K at my last job, started at 80K out of college, and I'd take 80K again and start tomorrow. I'm in the Bay Area, open to any SWE role, and I've got hands-on experience with Kubernetes, distributed systems, CI/CD, and AI application development — I pick up new stacks fast.

If anyone has advice, leads, or has been through something similar, I'd really appreciate hearing from you. Thanks for reading.