Have you looked at sales? I’m a sales engineer. It’s a pre-sales technical role. My role is to listen for and understand the goals of the customer, identify gaps where our technology will help, and then persuade them to give it a chance using presentations, demos, and POCs.

I also spend time thinking of new ways to communicate our complexity into easier to digest formats, sometimes even crafting entirely new taking points to directly address my customers way of thinking about their problems.

I’ll invent new ways of combining our tooling into stories and use cases that I feel matter to the folks I’m taking to. It’s a demo, but it’s a story and hopefully it’s a story that my customer recognizes in their own organization and can relate to.

A lot of what I do is driven from my own 30+ years of experience, because believe it or not: while the paint is new on the new tools, and the modern processes have new names, the gears and cogs behind the scene are still the same. Customers run into the same issues. They feel the same pain.

Anyways. With your experience at Amazon, and probably AWS, you would have a lot of valuable experience for a pre-sales team that focuses on anything like cloud, highly scaled infra, storage, high performance networking, and probably even databases, CRM, or monitoring and visibility.

Any of those industries would love to have your experience on their team.

The only issue is that you’ll have to public speak, communicate your ideas effectively, and have a lot of customer empathy (instead of saying “oh that’s a dumb way of doing it” say “oh, that’s a unique way I haven’t seen before!”)

In all honesty, pre-sales is the best job I’ve ever had. I get to play with tech, tinker with hardware, and I’m not on-call. A sale is great, but I get a lot of pride knowing that a customer is using something I sold them to make their business grow and the individuals work easier. I can point to it and say: I had a part of that.