Just turned 25 and I’m having an existential crisis about my career – Please help

I realize this is going to be a really long text but I’d really appreciate it if you guys could give me some help.

Canadian citizen, Montreal, finishing my CS degree in December 2026. No co-op, no internships. Been applying for about a year.

Where I’m at:

• Over 400 applications, almost all cold through company career sites
• About 50 cold messages on LinkedIn to recruiters and hiring managers
• Zero interviews with a human being
• The LinkedIn ones get marked as read and then ignored.

The only things that ever came back were automated. A recorded video interview where you talk to a webcam. A timed coding test. An assessment batch for a games studio. A questionnaire from a small startup. All of those are machines. Nobody has ever gotten on a call with me.

I’m not posting this to vent. I want to know what’s actually broken, because 400 is enough for the number to mean something and I clearly can’t diagnose it from inside my own head.

What I think might be wrong.
A lot of those 400 were internships I was never eligible for. Most internship programs require you to go back to school afterward. I graduate in December so I don’t. One trading firm rejected me and told me straight up to come back for their 2027 campus cycle. If most of my 400 were internship postings, the graduation date field alone could have killed them before anyone read a word.
The LinkedIn DMs are going to the wrong people. I’ve been messaging recruiters. They get flooded and they have no reason to answer a student with no internships. Should I be messaging engineers on the actual teams instead?
What I have.
• Paid engineering work since March 2026 at a small studio. Started as a full stack contract, now I’m the only person handling hosting, DNS, TLS, deploys and content releases on their live site.
• A container init supervisor in C++17. Runs as PID 1, forwards SIGTERM to the child process group, escalates to SIGKILL, reaps orphans as a subreaper, exports Prometheus counters. CI stands the whole Compose stack up on every push and fails if Grafana isn’t serving.
• A mutation testing gate on an open source Java project that fails the build when test quality drops below a committed baseline.
• Three allocators written by hand in Zig, no GC, manual alignment.
• A neural net built from NumPy primitives plus a PyTorch version with controlled experiments written up.
• CTF, top 30 out of about 93 teams.
• TA for intro programming, 120 first years.
What I want. Systems, backend, infra, DevOps. What I actually love is low level and embedded. I’ve done ESP32 work with UART and SPI and it isn’t even on the resume.
Questions.
1. Out of 400 applications with zero human interviews, is that a resume problem, a targeting problem, or just the market right now? I can’t tell.
2. Should I stop applying to internships completely and only go after 2027 new grad and junior full time?
3. Is “no internships but I’m the sole engineer on a live production site” survivable, or does small client work read as filler?
4. In Montreal specifically, what channel actually works. Career fairs, professors, staffing agencies, cold DMs to engineers, referrals?
5. Am I too spread out wanting systems and backend and DevOps and embedded at the same time?