As an #engineer there are more roles available to progress your career into other than becoming a Senior Engineer or an Architect. There is a section of engineering called #salesengineering, here are some of the roles that exist there

#salesengineer role includes working closely with #sales to consult with customers on their requirements, how they work and capturing their needs. You will be delivering product demos to customers so are required to have a deep understanding of the product & the tech surrounding.

#solutionsarchitect (me!) Delivering custom solutions to customers, having a deep understanding of the product & the tech it works with to advise customers on special integrations when out of the box solution if not right for them. Includes planning & coding up custom tools.

Both roles provide much more customer facing time than traditional engineering. More consultant based, however there is still coding involved, especially for a #solutionsarchitect. Creating mini products from scratch is fun but also different to a traditional team structure.

When working in #salesengineering your goals are also a little different, they are heavily tied to the success of the sale or renewal (retention). So you are driven by these metrics more than the product roadmap, it all still connects together heavily and required collaboration.