I am a professional who, over the past decade, transitioned between software engineer, tech lead, devops and engineering manager. None of these roles are fully enjoyable to me anymore, for different reasons (happy to elaborate if needed). Currently at a FAANG in a senior tech lead SWE role, in what a lot of people would call a pretty good role, but I still don’t like it.<p>What I like doing is complex performance-related troubleshooting and investigations. Think about bugs or performance issues that might take multiple weeks to solve and require going across the stack, from adding some kernel instrumentation to verify some hypothesis, to understanding exactly how a distributed database is storing data and why it is slow (by reading, tracing and understanding its code), and clearly plenty of debugging on the various applications that drive these systems (contention issues, race conditions, memory leaks, concurrency bottlenecks, …). The acceptance criteria would be me fixing the issue, or writing an extensive report advising someone else on how to fix it. An example of this would be the stories posted by Brendan Gregg on his website.<p>In my experience, the majority of professionals I work with find the above problems tedious, whereas I tend to be very interested in such challenges. When I find a good one I’m attracted to it like a magnet and the hours just fly, I feel like I’m learning at massive speed compared to if I were to write code for a feature.<p>Where do I find work like this full time, and not just a task people expect me to occasionally do while still having to deliver major pieces of new software as the main job? Which companies/roles? Is there an opportunity to set up a consultancy path?<p>To be clear I’m not talking about SRE / DevOps, at least not what it typically means in Silicon Valley companies these days: I have a lot of respect for the role, but maintaining YAML and alerts ain’t my thing.