Edit: This was pre-mature and I'm working on something exciting here :-)

Cloud providers offering more and more services on their platforms has led to a democratization of distributed systems. The side-effect of this is that the skills to build such systems are directly transferable only to a small set of companies:

1. cloud providers themselves (Microsoft, AWS, Azure, Joyent, etc),
2. large tech enterprises such as Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, etc., or
3. niche service providers such as Databricks, Confluent, Snowflake, etc.

This has also resulted in a stratification of engineering jobs into 3 main categories:

1. AI/ML/Data: Work with data and enable creation of intelligent user experiences,
2. Product: Front-end, Design, and Product backend engineering to actually create intelligent UX, and
3. Infrastructure Engineering / SRE: Stitching together cloud services to enable the product and AI teams. This also goes by "Platform Engineering" these days.

I see the 3rd category as a natural home for distributed systems engineers (like myself) who want to explore opportunities at companies that don't fit the 3 company categories in the first list. The only difference from traditional systems/distributed systems engineering being that the lego blocks used to build systems are at a higher lever of abstraction — working with cloud services instead of file systems, networks and operating systems.