One of the best thing about coding positions is that they allow you to enter a new company and start contributing immediately in a very high value way. If you'

One of the best thing about coding positions is that they allow you to enter a new company and start contributing immediately in a very high value way. If you're good at this, companies will typically heap as much responsibility on you as you can take - largely because the only way the developer can be effective is to gain domain knowledge. I think that one of the best ways to get to other technical positions is to start as a developer and move into these other roles once you start to understand the business and product (note: I definitely don't view moving out of development as necessarily "moving up", just "moving over" - in fact, I'd avoid companies that view the software development role as a "bottom rung" position. These companies will write unbelievably crappy software and almost certainly lose any meaningful technology race). Any reason you don't want to start with the dev position? You have a technical degree - did you do any programming during it?