This. Being a sales engineer can be just as technically demanding as any job shuffling protobufs in a big tech company. But there's a lot more 1:1 interaction talking to people and gathering information about the problem they're trying to solve.

Jobs like devrel can also have a good combination of being technical and talking to people and giving presentations.

Finally roles like "Technical Account Manager" can vary really widely across companies - in some cases these are basically glorified support jobs or sales jobs where you're dealing with existing customers instead of new customers. In other places it can be more like a solutions engineer where you're implementing a customer-specific solution using your company's platform. Again, a lot of 1:1 communication with customers.

Highly recommend this as well. And I encourage people to not get scared off by the "sales" aspect of the job. As the technical resource, you're almost never closing deals, cold calling, or any of the other salesy responsibilities. Your job is really just to help the potential customer solve a problem with your technology. You gather requirements about their problem, and have technical conversations to show how your product(s) can be a good fit.

You get to build demos, and learn new technologies and never have to be responsible for production.

The earning potential can be very high, especially if your team exceeds your sales quotas.

Look for jobs like solution architect, sales engineer, customer engineer, pre-sales engineer.