[programminggeek]

I think of this role as "The Fixer". On most teams I've worked on there is someone who ends up doing the hard parts, knows the obscure parts of the system, and tends to end up optimizing queries, cleaning up algorithms, and generally guides the long term technical direction, whether they have a title to go with it or not.

In my experience, while a software scientist or fixer is highly valued, they aren't necessarily highly paid moreso than anyone else on a team. Also, a technical lead is not always going to do this job or do it well if given it.

The largest part of development doesn't rely on someone with this specialization to write the initial code for any feature, yet without this skillset a team will ship some terrible code without realizing it.

I don't really see any group hiring for this kind of role.