[giantg2]

That's nice that you get told that you do a good job.

I second the idea about becoming an architect. There are also other roles like sales engineers, help desk, security consultants, etc. It depends on what you enjoy, how much human interaction you want, and what positions are available in your area.

[nicwhittle]

The architect sounds interesting. Do you have any links for examples etc?

[giantg2]

There are various types of architects, such as dat architects, software architects, solutions architects, etc. These also vary between companies and seniority.

For example, at my company a data architect helps a project by reviewing the data they plan to use and suggesting where to store it and how to structure the data. They might review a team's plan and provide suggestions. The data architect also might help a team if they are having trouble getting the data they need.

We also have software architects that review projects and consult for the project teams to ensure that the proposed system architecture follow best practices and be efficient. So they might recommend using SNS+SQS instead of just SQS because they see a future need for other projects to access those messages and they could all subscribe to the SNS topic then poll their own SQS that is fed by a filtered subscription to that SNS topic.

Here is a general link for solutions architect. https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/solution-architect/