The stack eventually bottoms out
Even when working primarily in cloud infrastructure or high-level services, there are moments when the fastest route to truth is understanding what the process, binary, or operating system is actually doing.
Reverse engineering sharpens defensive intuition
Analyzing memory corruption, allocator behavior, and exploit paths teaches the kinds of assumptions that break under pressure. That feeds directly back into more defensive software design.
Debugging depth changes engineering judgment
Low-level fluency improves how you reason about performance, unsafe boundaries, failure modes, and remediation tradeoffs even when the immediate problem is not exploitation.