OS kernels, databases, networking and distributed systems primitives, backend business logic services, config management, orchestration, containerization, etc.

OS kernels, databases, networking and distributed systems primitives, backend business logic services, config management, orchestration, containerization, etc. A sufficiently large organization doing web or mobile service delivery at scale will be working on these things. Look for a "core infrastructure" or "systems engineer" role. They may ultimately exist in a business's infrastructure to prop up some HTTP endpoints, but you can work on them for years without touching JavaScript/HTML/CSS or even HTTP. (A lot of people are using REST across internal services, but Thrift and friends are popular too.) Then of course there's native mobile application development. You might have some more trouble finding traditional non-networked desktop GUI apps to work on.