Last week, I officially left my role as a Software Engineer at Bloomberg after almost three years. However, if you had told university student Rahil that I would be doing this, he would not believe you.
At the time, it was no secret to anyone around me that Bloomberg was top of the list of companies I wanted to work at as a graduate. First of all, the name. Bloomberg. It held weight. Everyone knows about Bloomberg and with that comes prestige. Working there felt like it came with a certain level of credibility. Then there is the company culture. Everyone I knew who had worked there had spoken about their smart colleagues, an inclusive team and an environment where you were trusted to give valuable input. But the most personal and important thing was the company’s values. Bloomberg care a lot about giving back; 85% of their annual profits go towards philanthropic causes driven by Bloomberg Philanthropy. Why did this matter to me? I see great value in giving back where one can and I saw a lot of value in working for a company with values that were aligned with my own.
In Dec 2022, after two unsuccessful applications in previous years, I sat on the floor in the corner of the university computer labs as I was given the details of the full-time offer over the phone. I was listening but I was not really listening. I was too distracted in delight. I knew that one of my dreams had come true.
Fast forward three and a half years later and I have said goodbye to the position that I once dreamed of. Why? This article is a reflection on the whole journey to get here.
Phase 1: seeds of doubt
It was September 2025 and I had been in the team for almost two years. I experienced a lot of growth in that time and was determined to continue on that trend. To do this, I had been taking on different responsibilities outside of my day to day duties.
One such responsibility was representing the team in the quarterly planning process while my team lead was on holiday. In short, this is the process of deciding which projects the group should work on in the upcoming quarter. To help decide, I would have to reasonably estimate the effort certain projects would require. On the surface, this sounded like a great thing to get experience in. Project scoping means I would need to build an understanding of the business context, the existing system and more. Doing this effectively involves asking the right questions in a setting where answers are not clearly defined. This felt like a step up from what I was used to, where the answers would already be provided in a well-defined task I would then implement.
In reality, I ended up disliking the whole process and my involvement in it. There were many reasons for this and at the end of it, I was certain that I did not want to do more project scoping and refinement in the future. Along with this realisation came a question I asked myself for the first it in a long time:
“If not this, how do I want my career to progress?”
This was an uncomfortable question because of the quiet doubt that came with it. Until this point, I had not given my long term career progression any thought. I had accomplished my university dream of working at Bloomberg and that was enough. Surely. Right? Even if I asked myself this question, I had no idea how to meaningfully answer it. What did I do when faced with this uncomfortable doubt? I tried to ignore it, thinking it would figure itself out with time.
It did not figure itself out with time. Over the next few months (until the end of 2025), seemingly random events in my work and personal life would remind me of the question surrounding the future of my career. In one case, completing a personality test as part of a training course made me doubt whether my strengths were aligned with my current role. In another example, a university friend asked me if I was looking to change jobs, suggesting that the role he was in was a great fit for the person he knew me to be.
No matter how much I tried to ignore these thoughts, they kept on reappearing. And as 2026 started, I knew I could no longer ignore them. I started paying attention to the seed of doubt.
Phase 2: facing myself in the mirror
How do I want my career to progress?
To begin answering this question truthfully, I had to accept the possibility that what I once desired for my career may not be what I desired now. This was difficult. Doubting my current role felt like I was being ungrateful for the opportunity that I had worked so hard to get at university. But as I began to accept this shift, I started looking at what was causing the doubt. Understanding my current position would help me better articulate what was important for me moving forward.
Eventually, a messy combination of talking to people, reading articles and reflection led me to identify a few things that I wanted to prioritise in the next stages of my career.
A different industry
I had joined a team that contributed to a financial product and understanding how our clients use this product helped me build a better understanding of the financial world. However, I was never tied to this industry. I thought that exposure to how software is used in different industries would prove to be beneficial in the long run, allowing me to view problems from a unique perspective and adapt to changing scenarios (thank you David Epstein for driving this point home in “Range”, a book I was reading at the time).
Communicating ideas
Around this time, a common question I grappled with was:
Where am I uniquely placed to provide value in my career?
There were a few drivers to this. For one, I had been reflecting on my strengths and the kinds of challenges that I naturally lean towards tackling. On top of this, I was considering what was next for the role of the software engineer more broadly, having observed my colleagues become more productive with the rise of Claude Code and Copilot.
As I reflected, a skill that I wanted to sharpen to provide unique value was the ability to communicate a concept that is hard to understand to someone who needs to understand it. This is a skill that
I have built over the years (through pursuits like writing, podcasting and more),
I wanted to build further as it felt aligned with my personality and
is important to grow for any modern-day software engineer becoming more productive with AI
Understanding and seeing the impact your work has
What did I dislike about project scoping and planning process? It was not the act of project scoping itself but rather not knowing why we were choosing between the projects that we were. This is a typical “software engineer in a big company” problem. There are several layers between you and the rooms where high level direction is defined as well as the clients that use the software that you help build.
I found myself increasingly frustrated with being handed the high level goal by other people and being sheltered from the impact that projects you contribute to have.
(As a disclaimer, there is nothing inherently wrong with being a software engineer in a big company, especially when weighed up with other benefits)
These three points formed a sort-of-checklist that I referred to when considering my options moving forward. I could have
stayed where I was,
leant on internal mobility at Bloomberg to move to another engineering team,
transitioned to a software engineering role at another company or
pivoted to another role at another company.
Phase 3: making assumptions and validating them
Knowing what I wanted to prioritise moving forward made it clear to me that a change in role made the most sense. What role I would pivot into was something to figure out, but I started with a role that I had some familiarity with- the forward deployed engineer (FDE).
The FDE role, over-simplified, is a hybrid of a software engineer and a consultant. They are still technical and contribute heavily to the software implementation process to address a customer’s needs. However, they also interact heavily with these customers to understand said needs, scoping out requirements and acting as a point of contact throughout the customer’s interaction with the solutions provider.
From the little I knew about the role, typically found in smaller software companies, it seems to tick all of my boxes.
Working at a different company meant I could decide to expose myself to a different industry. This was particularly true for software consultancies like Palantir (the father of the forward deployed engineer role), where you work on different projects over time.
Being a point of contact for the customer meant translating technical implementation to non-technical people and non-technical user requirements to technical design. The art of communication is crucial in doing this effectively.
A smaller company usually means having more agency and being part of shaping the company’s direction. The lack of processes and structure gives one more freedom to experiment and pursue ideas that they think will be impactful.
But even these reasons relied on my assumption of the role. This assumption was something that needed validating. There were two main ways I gathered information to address unknowns.
Talking to FDEs (and ex-FDEs)
Fortunately, I knew a few people (mainly from university) who had been an FDE at some point in their career. I gave them context, explained what I was thinking and asked them questions like
What does your day to day look like?
What are your work hours and how consistent / stable are they?
In comparison to a typical SWE, how technical is the role?
Are there any non-obvious differences between being an FDE where you work vs being an FDE at another company?
Actually applying to FDE roles
At the time, applying to FDE roles did not seem like an information gathering exercise. Instead, I thought the path was a path of sequential steps to carry out in order.
Step 1: Gather information to get full clarity in your decision to transition roles
Step 2: Prepare for interviews
Step 3: Start applying to companies once you are fully prepared.
Thinking I needed to be at a certain level of certainty and preparation before sitting any interview made me hesitate in applying for any role at any company. I overcame this barrier by lowering the expectation I had for my first application (shout out to my life coach George for helping me shift my mindset). In hindsight, even sitting that one interview was crucial in understanding how I felt about the FDE role. Not only did I get to talk to more FDEs but the interviews gave me an insight into what companies value in an applicant for an FDE role.
As I had more conversations and sat more interviews, my doubts around transitioning role started to ease. It did not completely go away. It still has not gone away. But friends understood my thought process and could see how the FDE role could suit me. I enjoyed having to think on my feet during interviews and working on vague problems where one had to seek out more information to tackle the problems effectively. As the doubt eased, confidence in my decision started to grow.
Two months after submitting my first application (first in ~3.5 years), I received an offer to work as an FDE at a start up. At this point, I had (enough) faith in my decision to transition to this kind of role and learning more about the company made me excited to be part of their mission and the culture they have cultivated. This excitement was the signal I used to know that the time was right to take this new opportunity. I have deliberately kept this part of the story brief because I think the shift in mindset I had undergone to apply for an external role was more important than the application processes themselves.
It is hard to fully capture the shape that this journey took. This article can make it seem as if event A led to realisation B which led to action C. In reality, the story to get to where I am now- writing this article having left my job in the pursuit of a career transition- was anything but linear.
Perhaps this is indicative from the time it took to get here. Surrounding the honest reflections and steps of progress were feelings of doubt, hesitation in making decisions and a profound difficulty to accept that what was once my dream was no longer my dream. If I am honest, I could still be wrong about this whole thing. I may discover, a year or so from now, that this move was not what I thought it would be. But I still feel a sense of peace knowing that I listened to my gut (after trying to ignore it and failing to do so) and took the step that I feel is the right one at this current moment.