Having a few years of DE experience, I'm thinking about the same thing. I guess it's slightly different from a new graduate, but having some low level projects should help, or at least some higher level C/C++ projects to show competence in the language.

I think an easier maneuver is to find a job that works on developer tools (library, monitoring tools, etc.) that do not necessarily use low level languages, and then gradually move into a low level job. But I have yet to begin to test it.