Look into “solution engineer”, sometimes called “sales engineer” or “pre-sales engineer”. They are often paired with a sales expert as their technical partner. There are often 1 solution engineer to 2-4 sales experts.
Solution engineers are often engineer / developers who are good at communicating, explaining, asking questions. Activities often involve “technical proof-of-concepts” (commonly called POCs), running trials and “bake offs” (for example comparing between competitors). SEs often work closely with product engineering - communicating customer requirements, figuring out how to integrate with a clients’s particular setup, hosting workshops & webinars, going to a clients HQ and whiteboarding solutions. Often 25% travel (1-2 days on site with local customers, and travel once a month by flight to spend time with a customer for workshop.) You are expected to keep your tech skills sharp. Some progressions of this role are called “Field CTO”. This person is often a domain
+ technology expert (eg eCommerce + cloud microservices).
One financial benefit of a SE role is that - being on the sales org of the company, you are on the revenue generating side - not a cost center. Quality of life in the company can be nice because of that. Your compensation will often have a variable “bonus” to it - tied to the performance of the sales team (eg 25%+ of your total compensation).
If you know a piece of software, tool, or general domain, and you’re personally a big fan of them and use their software, that might be a good company to talk to about SE positions. Sometimes they might have a “developer advocate” role - which is someone who is also very plugged into the company’s customer / developers community.
If you’re interested in getting an SE job, one easy “cheat code” would be recording yourself doing “how to” on that company’s software, post to a youtube, and sharing it where customers are - might even be a subreddit you’re already in.
I saw a video where someone scanned thru months of a niche subreddit, found most common problems, and then made videos on how to solve those. Another idea is to use a tool like AnswerThePublic.com to find top questions related to a topic you know well (its based on search trends) - pick questions that are easy for you to answer, be prepared to see how crappy and annoying most videos are to solve that… then make your own video. Don’t want to get much into video on this thread, but Google Slides + OBS / simple 5 min how-to screenshare with decent audio would be better than 95% of the videos out there.
I’ve done this for awhile and happy to answer questions/ help out - worked at large cloud SaaS companies, and my clients are large well-known “Fortune 500” companies.
My career has bounced around from developer / architect / project manager / professional services (consultant) / customer success (technical account manager) / engineering product manager/ entrepreneur/ solution engineer and “fractional CTO” for startups.