Without knowing which pure area you work in, I can only surmise that you have at least some category theory, which is the theoretical underpinning of type theory. Add in algebraic types, aka sum types, and you may have a solid theoretical background for modern programming research, especially functional programming.<p>Combine that with a previous interest in assembler, et al, and there may be an interesting possibility of compiler optimization, byte code generation, etc.<p>How would one add introspection and pure functional programming with tail calls to a language such as Rust, e.g., and still maintain all of its safety guarantees while keeping build times reasonable?<p>As an aside, there is plenty of work for those with solid assembler or other low level experience. Don’t think commercial end user or web software, think embedded hardware, IoT HW, etc. my employer, e.g., will be adding FPGAs to our high security hardware products, and we will need that low level experience. We’re not hiring yet, but we aren’t the only ones out there.<p>Heck, maybe that’s an area of interest: marrying an open source tool chain to a high level, functional language, to an FPGA and getting performant, safe code that is not beholden to the arcana of specific manufacturers.