Field Application Engineer or Solutions Architect are excellent transitional roles to other things. You get to work with customers, a variety of customers. Then you arent stuck being with the one customer (whatever product company you are working for). Variety is good.

If you work with a range of external customers, opens more avenues for escape, also. Pure development is pretty tedious, you are treated like a cog.

Not enough people talk about how much software engineering actually can suck. I couldn't stand having a "SCRUM MASTER" breathing down my neck, demanding timelines for every bug, dragging and dropping tasks on me.