I'll be blunt rather than couch it: all the things you've listed will make you a ralph loop target in the org. You are adding human in the loop where the industry is moving in the opposite direction.
This is generally true across all roles, but first impact will be working that is more trivial for an agent or n8n flow.
So consider this and pick roles wisely, where you can see this existing for a bit. All the best.
> I am just much more comfortable supporting existing software than building new software.
Having technical skills is required, but you'd be doing little to no coding or design work.
> Being an interface between business and tech.
A sales engineer matches this almost by definition.
> Just working with people in general!
The job is essentially entirely about working with people, both with the customers you're trying to sell to, and with the developers who are actually making the product.
This also has the added benefit of making a lot of money even by engineering standards in the right organization. Looks for large enterprise companies where custom demos and new customer hypercare are standard. I've been on the other side of the table a few times and often pre-sales cycles are months long and contracts start in the $2-4M range. Those are the places where sales engineers will be treated as first-class citizens and not just "hey grab one of the engineers for this sales call."
Depending on where you start it could be a bigger salary drop than you expected, but it sounds like technical support might be your real passion. I’m the same way - I love in-the-weeds troubleshooting and helping people solve their business problems. I started out in SaaS sales, hated it, switched to IT during the pandemic. Another commenter mentioned systems integrators, you could also look at managed services. See if you can get into an escalations role so you’re not having to climb out of the help desk which you’re probably overqualified for. Look up companies that make products you love and see what openings they have. There’s no shame in supporting others.
If you have a secondary interest or hobby or real-world-knowledge about what consumers in a certain category want - you might be a good product manager in that field.
Many products require technical product managers.
Being people oriented and a "mediocre" technical engineer is not really a hinderance and can make your focus better aligned customer needs in a high level, not getting nerd-sniped on things that don't matter.
I suspect that engineers would prefer working under someone like you who doesn't have a god-like ego, and is likely to resolve conflicts between people.
> Wanted to work with tech from a more overarching level
> I get a huge sense of accomplishment seeing customers user our product’
> Interface between business and tech
You might like trying your hand in Professional Services either at a System Integrator like Deloitte or first-party in a product company (now often re-labelled as ‘forward deployed engineers’).
Their main problem space is getting customers to successfully use the product through marrying your understanding of the tech’s limitations and sweet spots with the customer’s organizational goals and culture, so daily work revolves less around deep technical design and more about org alignment and strategy (which is why SIs sometimes get a bad rap on a tech forum like HNews).
It probably pays less, and it can be more stressful when you’re billing for (and justifying) every hour, but in my experience the way it tends to be more dynamic (new projects+teams+customers often) and how you get to see very direct impact is quite rewarding.
Developer Experience is gaining in popularity. Your clients are internal and your objective is to remove obstacles, create shortcuts, keep everyone happy and productive. Lots of it is communication, finding out everyone's pain points and discussing what is technically feasible to ease that frustration - so that may tickle your people/support string. Things that are/can be part of DevEx are DevOps/Platform Engineering/Infra/CI/CD, QA, IdP, internal frameworks, onboarding, etc. Fun stuff imo.
Sounds like you may enjoy being a QA engineer. Good QA engineers are a really really good value add to a software team and can really save our ass. Technical QA engineers understand why things break, and are easy to coordinate with when preparing a larger release.
At my previous employer, the head QA engineer was the one pushing back at the PM when they were too ambitious. They basically owned the current "Is the next release still a buggy mess?" state.
Eh, SREs are generally considered harder to get into with more responsibility than regular development roles, unless I misunderstood what you meant with “reliability”.
I have a coworker who is incredible at the job it sounds like you want. The "keep customers happy" role. It's a massively important role in a company. It's part product support, part sales support and part product owner.
2026 has made him way more useful to us engineers. Before he used to send us tickets. Sometimes we delivered what the customer really wanted because of those tickets, and sometimes we needed a few iterations.
Now he uses AI to deliver pull requests that include full repro environments. These are slop, of course. Sometimes we can approve them almost unchanged. But more often they need to be completely rewritten. But even the latter is super valuable as a much more concrete representation of the bug or customer request than a ticket was.
AI does this really well, even better than new development. I regularly use Github copilot to automatically read production logs from the app and backend services, find errors logs, deeply scan the codebases, create theories about the issue, verify the theory matches production evidence, verify the theory in a sandbox env, create a failing test, and then suggest a minimal code change in a feature branch, verify test is passing now in sandbox, and submit a pr, along with a detailed analysis doc and any future design optimizations to fix the class of error.
AI is also very good at scanning legacy codebases, and reverse engineering design docs, system interfaces, and trying to reverse engineer what requirements and design tradeoffs lead to that system. It's not perfect, but already at medium software engineer level.
your skillset sounds like perfect match for technical presales engineer ... you need to work at an enterprise software company, where they sell big tickets software of tens of thousands of dollar service, so you're part of the ensemble, but the sale is big enough and technical enough that they have a pre-sales engineering team. You are 50% customer, 50% medium intensity technical but you just use/config/troubleshoot without being the engineer responsible for building
I'll be blunt rather than couch it: all the things you've listed will make you a ralph loop target in the org. You are adding human in the loop where the industry is moving in the opposite direction.
This is generally true across all roles, but first impact will be working that is more trivial for an agent or n8n flow.
So consider this and pick roles wisely, where you can see this existing for a bit. All the best.
Perhaps a sales engineer?
> I am just much more comfortable supporting existing software than building new software.
Having technical skills is required, but you'd be doing little to no coding or design work.
> Being an interface between business and tech.
A sales engineer matches this almost by definition.
> Just working with people in general!
The job is essentially entirely about working with people, both with the customers you're trying to sell to, and with the developers who are actually making the product.
This also has the added benefit of making a lot of money even by engineering standards in the right organization. Looks for large enterprise companies where custom demos and new customer hypercare are standard. I've been on the other side of the table a few times and often pre-sales cycles are months long and contracts start in the $2-4M range. Those are the places where sales engineers will be treated as first-class citizens and not just "hey grab one of the engineers for this sales call."
Depending on where you start it could be a bigger salary drop than you expected, but it sounds like technical support might be your real passion. I’m the same way - I love in-the-weeds troubleshooting and helping people solve their business problems. I started out in SaaS sales, hated it, switched to IT during the pandemic. Another commenter mentioned systems integrators, you could also look at managed services. See if you can get into an escalations role so you’re not having to climb out of the help desk which you’re probably overqualified for. Look up companies that make products you love and see what openings they have. There’s no shame in supporting others.
If you have a secondary interest or hobby or real-world-knowledge about what consumers in a certain category want - you might be a good product manager in that field.
Many products require technical product managers.
Being people oriented and a "mediocre" technical engineer is not really a hinderance and can make your focus better aligned customer needs in a high level, not getting nerd-sniped on things that don't matter.
I suspect that engineers would prefer working under someone like you who doesn't have a god-like ego, and is likely to resolve conflicts between people.
> Wanted to work with tech from a more overarching level
> I get a huge sense of accomplishment seeing customers user our product’
> Interface between business and tech
You might like trying your hand in Professional Services either at a System Integrator like Deloitte or first-party in a product company (now often re-labelled as ‘forward deployed engineers’).
Their main problem space is getting customers to successfully use the product through marrying your understanding of the tech’s limitations and sweet spots with the customer’s organizational goals and culture, so daily work revolves less around deep technical design and more about org alignment and strategy (which is why SIs sometimes get a bad rap on a tech forum like HNews).
It probably pays less, and it can be more stressful when you’re billing for (and justifying) every hour, but in my experience the way it tends to be more dynamic (new projects+teams+customers often) and how you get to see very direct impact is quite rewarding.
Developer Experience is gaining in popularity. Your clients are internal and your objective is to remove obstacles, create shortcuts, keep everyone happy and productive. Lots of it is communication, finding out everyone's pain points and discussing what is technically feasible to ease that frustration - so that may tickle your people/support string. Things that are/can be part of DevEx are DevOps/Platform Engineering/Infra/CI/CD, QA, IdP, internal frameworks, onboarding, etc. Fun stuff imo.
Sounds like you may enjoy being a QA engineer. Good QA engineers are a really really good value add to a software team and can really save our ass. Technical QA engineers understand why things break, and are easy to coordinate with when preparing a larger release.
At my previous employer, the head QA engineer was the one pushing back at the PM when they were too ambitious. They basically owned the current "Is the next release still a buggy mess?" state.
What about testing / QA / reliability? Plenty of such positions. Not particularly competitive to get into, as many view those jobs as "lesser" jobs.
Software sales engineering could be another, which probably also pays more. But, alas, more competitive.
Eh, SREs are generally considered harder to get into with more responsibility than regular development roles, unless I misunderstood what you meant with “reliability”.
Solutions architect post-sale fits better if you hate quotas. Same work, calmer.
I have a coworker who is incredible at the job it sounds like you want. The "keep customers happy" role. It's a massively important role in a company. It's part product support, part sales support and part product owner.
2026 has made him way more useful to us engineers. Before he used to send us tickets. Sometimes we delivered what the customer really wanted because of those tickets, and sometimes we needed a few iterations.
Now he uses AI to deliver pull requests that include full repro environments. These are slop, of course. Sometimes we can approve them almost unchanged. But more often they need to be completely rewritten. But even the latter is super valuable as a much more concrete representation of the bug or customer request than a ticket was.
Modern big tech software engineering is 98% supporting and maintaining.
AI does this really well, even better than new development. I regularly use Github copilot to automatically read production logs from the app and backend services, find errors logs, deeply scan the codebases, create theories about the issue, verify the theory matches production evidence, verify the theory in a sandbox env, create a failing test, and then suggest a minimal code change in a feature branch, verify test is passing now in sandbox, and submit a pr, along with a detailed analysis doc and any future design optimizations to fix the class of error.
AI is also very good at scanning legacy codebases, and reverse engineering design docs, system interfaces, and trying to reverse engineer what requirements and design tradeoffs lead to that system. It's not perfect, but already at medium software engineer level.
We're in the AI era now, every job is a supporting role.
your skillset sounds like perfect match for technical presales engineer ... you need to work at an enterprise software company, where they sell big tickets software of tens of thousands of dollar service, so you're part of the ensemble, but the sale is big enough and technical enough that they have a pre-sales engineering team. You are 50% customer, 50% medium intensity technical but you just use/config/troubleshoot without being the engineer responsible for building
Technical pre-sales?