I suspect that even though you have a lot of experience programming, recruiters aren't counting it as applicable experience to the jobs you want. You essentiall

I suspect that even though you have a lot of experience programming, recruiters aren't counting it as applicable experience to the jobs you want. You essentially have even less experience with cloud/ML than most college grads who at least took classes where they have applicable project experience. Changing job areas is hard, the best way imo is to find a company that does both what you currently excel at and what you want to do, then do an internal transfer to build experience. I've seen it done before where a friend of mine joined one team building internal support tools, switched to a different team doing data science, and now gets job offers for data science.