This kinda fits what I do at my current job. I've learned over time that this is a role that a small company really can benefit from and one most companies will

This kinda fits what I do at my current job. I've learned over time that this is a role that a small company really can benefit from and one most companies will not hire for. My current employer did, and it's a genuinely engaging role for me while also providing broad benefits to the engineering group overall. You're right in that it often de facto devolves to somebody who can sorta do it; my M.O. in my career has been instead to chase those roles, to be wide and deep and to plug as tightly as I can into the actual business hierarchy to understand how to solve high-value problems while exposing the results to the business to validate the time/effort/money expended. My current job is the most fun job I've ever had and I'm excited to be making stuff that people actually want to use, both in terms of our B2C product and the tools I work on for developers internally. I run our infrastructure team, with my focus there being around developer empowerment and developer-managed cloud resources for apps and services, and the necessary downstack education that that implies. But I've also done a lot of the formative work on our new APIs because I'd open-sourced a bunch of stuff in our stack and I've been building a lab so we can figure out what makes some web filters think our device (we sell in-home exercise equipment) is an "IoT device" that needs to be blackholed away from our API. I think you kinda have to run towards the fire, though. If it's high-value and requires pretty broad understanding of a grab bag of topics, I tend to move towards it--and it is always tremendously interesting and a lot of fun.