Those jobs exist and with a bit of job crafting you can definitely put yourself in such a role if you're working for the right company. It's just hard to get hi

Those jobs exist and with a bit of job crafting you can definitely put yourself in such a role if you're working for the right company. It's just hard to get hired for such a position from the start because new positions open when someone leaves or when you need to ship something new; no one ever adds headcount for refactoring and maintenance. Also, you need some experience with the codebase before you can effectively address technical debt so it's rare to get started with work like this as soon as you're hired. If you're working for a healthy team/company/manager and have a bit of experience already, you can actively seek this type of work and do more of the things you like. It's just unlikely that you'll be explicitly hired to do this. And as you pick up more of this kind of work, you need to communicate things clearly and make sure that it doesn't look like you're slacking or deliberately looking for lower profile work because that can hurt you too.