This brings back the memories of my first ever "high profile" job[1][2]. 2012, I was a wannabe gamedev at the time (even made a couple mediocre demos), but actually a pretty decent backend dev, so they somehow hired me to do the backend/devops. WebGL was a hot new thing at the time, and we were running into a lot of compatibility problems on various consumer GPUs. So I've helped get the 3D/frontend guys set up Sentry, so they could actually see and fix all the problems. Even though all my code ended up being "invisible", I like to think I had a hand in making the beautiful graphics happen.
I was a wannabe gamedev also, was obsessed with learning 3D concepts, optimizing code, learning assembly language, and so on. After getting nowhere with game companies (You think FAANG is selective?? Try late-90's game companies), my first job ended up being writing GPU drivers for a major graphics card company. Lucked out, I got to work with gaming technology but without the soul-crushing burnout and 80 hour week death marches.
This is honestly one of the best kept secrets in tech. If you actually want some work life balance and don't care too much about job titles and status, the best gigs period are those where you support the "front line" devs in some fashion. Nearly the same pay, but less stress and more self-direction. Tooling and QA folks rarely get called up at 3am on a Sunday morning because prod is down.
> Tooling and QA folks rarely get called up at 3am on a Sunday morning because prod is down.
My (devops) team did the tooling, but we've worked very closely with QA, and while they didn't get the pages, both teams felt that they shared the responsibility of making the final product (well basically a cool tech demo) rock solid for the viewers. In 4.5 years there I've touched ca 600 projects, but I agree with you - it was still easier than doing the frontend work. Arguably less glory but definitely more life.
[1]: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/find-your-way-to-oz
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBc5aYtz_0