I'm very similar to you! I'm a research software engineer at a medical research institution in Sydney. I'm the only engineer / developer type person on my team

I'm very similar to you! I'm a research software engineer at a medical research institution in Sydney. I'm the only engineer / developer type person on my team, and I work with other microbiologists, physicians and bioinformaticians (who know scripting/programming but specifically for answering biological questions). The system I'm building tracks samples in the lab, patient data coming in from the hospitals, and genomics data from the sequencing lab and bioinformaticians. I do "engineer" type things, but I have full autonomy and I support the rest of the team. What we do is impactful too — our clinical trial just treated three patients. I don't write unit tests because I can't be bothered. I do write documentation though, but for myself. Downsides are: it gets lonely being the only one that does this, and there's no one to bounce ideas off of; no one else knows what you work on or understands what you're building (which can be a good or a bad thing); you're that "IT person" in the back. Oh and the pay is awful compared to real tech jobs