Site Reliability Engineering
Anyone who has ever seen the deployment diagram of Google's ad serving will vouch that Google simply cannot exist without great SREs. If you like both dev ops and software engineering, and have found that your affinity to dev ops makes you a black sheep, I encourage you to apply to an SRE position at Google. I can state unequivocally, that SRE's are held in great regard at Google, and they receive a tremendous amount of respect. This is helped somewhat by the fact that you have to actually earn their support. Until your service is considered maintainable and observable enough to not cause pain, you'll be doing your own DevOps. It's only when you pass the PRR (production readiness review) that you _might_ get _some_ SRE help.<p>Disclosure: I'm a former Google employee