I was mainly focused on backend during university. Later, I decided to learn DevOps to understand the full software lifecycle, and I benefited a lot from it. My first full-time job was in DevOps, and I’ve been doing it for about a year.
Sometimes I still enjoy studying backend because I feel it helps me a lot with DevOps and my work. Do you think I should continue as a DevOps engineer, or look for a backend role with DevOps responsibilities? And how should I balance my learning—focus more on DevOps and learn DevSecOps/platform engineering alongside backend, or follow a different plan?

I would not treat this as a strict fork in the road. Backend and DevOps are not that far apart, and in many teams the best engineers understand both the application side and the operational side well.

So the better question is not “which title is correct?”, it is “what kind of work do I want to be closer to for the next 2–3 years?” If you enjoy infrastructure, delivery, reliability, CI/CD, observability, and operating systems at scale, staying in DevOps/SRE/platform-leaning work makes sense. If you enjoy APIs, data modeling, business logic, performance, and building product features more directly, then a backend role with strong operational ownership may fit better. Both are valid, and moving between them later is very possible.

For learning, I’d bias toward depth in your current job and keep the other side warm. Since you already work in DevOps, go deeper there first: cloud fundamentals, Linux/networking, containers, Kubernetes if relevant, CI/CD, observability, security basics, and infrastructure design. Then keep studying backend enough to stay sharp: build small services, understand databases well, and learn how applications behave in production. That combination is very valuable.

I would not rush into collecting labels like DevOps + DevSecOps + Platform + Backend all at once. Pick one as your main professional identity for now, and use the other as a strong secondary skill. After another year or so, the direction usually becomes much clearer from the kind of problems you naturally enjoy solving.