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."

I think I can second this. I was offered an FAE job (essentially the sales engineer of hardware) and they were going to pay me more money to write no code and spend most of my time in the road talking to people about products. But I like writing code. Presumably a great job for somebody who doesn't/can't.

This is honestly a career path I’ve never really considered, but after reading about it a little bit the role sounds like it would be right up my alley. I’m going to explore the market for sales engineers here in Sweden and see what kinds of roles are available. Thanks for your comment.

Background: Support --> Technical Sales

The job aspects which you listed are more aligned with support roles rather than technical sales / presales / solution architects. On the technical sales side, there's less time spent exploring / troubleshooting compared to presenting what is already built. Some companies have overlay technical sales teams which act as SMEs for technical sales where there is more time spent exploration and troubleshooting and less time spent doing basic demos.

One constraint that you need to be mindful of: salary. Support roles do not pay particularly well if your goal is to live a middle+ class lifestyle. Happy to chat with specifics from my experience if you reach out. I see that you live in Sweden where the upside for technical sales from a salary perspective is lower than in the US.

Do you usually need experience in sales to land a sales engineer job?

For the most part, probably no, because a sales engineer requires substantial engineering experience, so requiring sales experience on top of that would limit the candidate pool too much. I'm sure that there are higher-level sales engineer roles that require previous sales experience, but the OP's previous engineering experience should be enough to land an entry-level role.