The reason it annoys me so much is that it makes it harder to find post-sales technical generalists as the top of the funnel ends up filled with pre-sales people.
Congrats to OP for finding something they like though!
Honestly I had a negative connotation about sales for most of my career, but turns out I really love it. The exposure to different problems every day is awesome and more like a puzzle than work to me. I feel a bit of reverse imposter syndrome though, like I should feel bad that I didn't "make it" as a real engineer. So that's a weird feeling.
One thing I try to do in my company is pull engineers into sales calls and proofs-of-concepts if I can. I think that exposure to both real users and unique environments is important for their growth and novelty in the job.
My story: mostly business analytics (2005-2022), sales engineering, sales (both at same tech start up), and now running a solo consulting business.
I also really liked sales. Updating a CRM, not so much. But sales allowed me to spend my day talking with people about problems. No day the same, and lots of focus on finding different/better ways to communicate.
In what industries did these roles happen? Same industry/domain or have you changed that as well?
If you're working in SaaS or commodity products and have to run POCs a lot, you're totally correct.
Now they are working on continuous learning so that they can roll out new model (it is a very adversarial line of business and the models get stale in O(hours)). For that part I only helped them design the thing, no hands on. It was a super fun engagement TBH
I was good at DevOps. This isn't a story about escaping a job I hated. I spent five years as a DevSecOps engineer at two large financial services companies. I built things I was proud of. I learned a ton. I was respected by my team.
But somewhere around year four, something shifted. The work didn't change. I did. After five years, I made a change that surprised everyone who knew me: I left for a sales-adjacent role. Today, I'm one year into working as a Solutions Engineer at Infisical, and I want to share what I've learned. I think there are other DevOps engineers out there who might be feeling the same thing I felt, even if they can't quite name it yet.
For a long time, I couldn't pinpoint what was wrong. The job was fine. I was good at it. But I started dreading the monotony of it all.
Part of it was repetition. My days had become predictable: check the dashboards, respond to tickets, debug whatever broke overnight, push some Terraform, go home. Maintain the HashiCorp Vault clusters, manage the secrets pipelines, answer the same support questions. Repeat. The work that used to feel engaging had become routine.
Part of it was stagnation. When I first started, I was learning constantly. Vault architecture, PKI fundamentals, secrets rotation, the politics of platform adoption in a large enterprise. But once I'd mastered the core toolset and codebase, the learning curve flattened. I wasn't being challenged anymore. I was just keeping things running.
And part of it was isolation. Most days, it was just me and my pipelines. My primary relationships were with CI/CD tools and YAML files. The humans I did interact with were usually frustrated. They needed something from me, or something I owned was blocking them. I missed working with people, not just unblocking them from behind a ticket queue.
I didn't have a word for what I was looking for. I just knew that what I was doing wasn't it anymore.
I had no idea Solutions Engineering was a real career path.
I knew sales existed. I vaguely knew there were "technical sales" people. But I assumed those were salespeople who'd learned enough technical vocabulary to get by, not engineers who actually stayed technical while working with customers.
Some friends in sales pointed it out to me. They'd watched me get animated whenever someone asked how something worked, and one of them eventually said: "You know there's a job where you explain technical stuff to people all day and help them solve problems, right?"
I'd never considered anything sales-adjacent because I assumed it meant leaving the technical world. But the more I learned about SE, the more I realized it might solve everything I was missing. New problems to solve every day. Constant learning. And more people.
I ended up joining Infisical. There's some irony there: I spent years managing HashiCorp Vault, and now I work for a Vault competitor. But that background is exactly why the role made sense. I knew the space. I knew the pain points. I knew what it felt like to be the engineer on the other side, evaluating these tools.
The biggest change is the simplest one: I talk to people now. A lot of people. Every day.
In a single week, I might have a discovery call with a fintech startup, demo to a platform team at an aerospace company, help a healthcare organization troubleshoot their Kubernetes deployment, and run a workshop for a manufacturing company's security team. Fintech to aerospace to healthcare to manufacturing, all with completely different stacks and problems.
And it's not all over Zoom. I get to visit customers on-site, sit down with their teams face to face, and actually understand how they work. Over time, you build real relationships with these people. You become their trusted technical advisor, not just a vendor they talk to once. That's something I never experienced in DevOps, where my "customers" were internal teams who mostly just wanted me to unblock them.
The contrast with my DevOps days is stark. Monday morning used to mean checking dashboards, then the ticket queue, then the same Slack questions I'd answered last week. Now Monday morning might mean prepping for a demo with a company I've never spoken to, or helping a long-time customer work through a new challenge. I genuinely don't know what most days will look like until they start.
One thing I didn't expect: I'm not just talking to customers. I've become a bridge between the people using our product and the people building it. Every customer conversation surfaces pain points, feature gaps, edge cases our docs don't cover. I take that back to engineering and product. I'm actually influencing what we build next, which is something I never had in DevOps. I was always downstream of decisions, not shaping them.
My biggest fear going in was that I'd lose my technical edge. That I'd become "the sales guy" and slowly forget how things actually worked.
That didn't happen. As an SE, I'm exposed to everything. Customers running Kubernetes, ECS, Lambda, bare metal, air-gapped environments. AWS, Azure, GCP, hybrid setups. CI/CD in Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab, CircleCI. I have to understand their environment well enough to actually help them, so the learning is constant. The stagnation I felt in DevOps? Gone.
But all those years in DevOps weren't just background. They're the reason I'm useful in this role.
I get on calls and prospects describe problems I've literally lived. They talk about the pain of managing secrets at scale, and I can say "yeah, I've been there" and actually mean it. That shared experience changes the dynamic completely. I'm not a salesperson trying to manufacture urgency. I'm an engineer who dealt with the same problems and found something that helped.
Is it all upside? No. Demoing is a skill I had to build from scratch. The context-switching is intense. The stress is different, more human, more ambiguous. But it's the kind of challenge that makes me better, not the kind that grinds me down.
This path isn't for everyone. If you love going deep on a single system and optimizing it over years, SE might feel too scattered. If you genuinely prefer working alone with your tools, the constant human interaction might drain you.
But if any of this resonates, if you're good at DevOps but feel stuck, if the work has become repetitive, if you miss collaborating with people, if you find yourself energized when explaining technical concepts or helping someone work through a problem, Solutions Engineering might be worth exploring.
I didn't know this role existed until someone pointed it out to me. Now, one year in, I can't imagine going back. Not because DevOps is bad. It's critical work, and the people who do it well deserve more credit than they get.
But for me, it was missing something I didn't know how to name until I found it: the chance to be technical and connected. To keep learning, to solve new problems every day, and to do it alongside people instead of behind a queue.
If you're a DevOps engineer feeling something similar, even if you can't quite articulate it, maybe this is what you're looking for too.
I didn't know this role existed until someone pointed it out to me. Consider this me pointing it out to you. We're hiring at Infisical.