That's some good advice. I'm more interested in doing similar work in a green tech field, so I guess I'll focus more on the SWE skills. I don't necessarily want to limit the scope of what I apply to just yet. I'm sure if I poke around and pretend like I can't do my job otherwise, I can get some funding allocated to an IRAD project just for me. Should be able to swing a "mock cloud infrastructure for future ML/AI development." Plus, it'll probably help them out in the long run. The gov is both incredibly long and short sighted sometimes. "We want AI, it's the future, we want to invest in it for the next two decades" along with "wait, you need computers to do AI?"

I'm not excited about staying where I am for that long, but that whole "write your own ticket" part might be worth the time.