I was the kid who took things apart to see whether they'd go back together, and who was quietly more interested in the taking-apart. That never really changed — I just found an industry that pays for it.
The route here wasn't planned. Nearly a decade of engineering at one company, then a jump into cloud and reliability work at another, and somewhere in the middle the realisation that the part I actually loved was removing the reason a problem existed rather than fixing the problem again. That's the whole job description, more or less: notice the thing everyone has quietly accepted as normal, and refuse to accept it.
I'm a generalist by instinct: I'd rather borrow an idea from an unrelated field than perfect one I already know. Ask me about error budgets, why most alerts are noise, what twenty years of Warcraft patch notes teach you about changing a system people depend on, or the economics of a virtual auction house. I'll take any of those for an hour.