I work as a generalist software engineer at a relatively small company with interesting scalability problems in the valley. I mostly focus on infrastructure operations but, unlike most devops I encounter at meetups, I very often like to go into low level details of distributed systems and system troubleshooting, it's pretty typical for me to fire up perf and troubleshoot a kernel performance issue by tracing some kernel code path (in other words, I really enjoy following the amazing work of performance experts like http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/index.html).

In terms of programming, I do ok, I am proficient in a few languages (mostly C and Go), but I really don't like doing what most programming in my company means (REST APIs, plumbing code to interface with DB, ...), and I don't feel I have skills strong enough that I would pass a coding challenge at one of the big companies (although I have a very solid understanding of basic data structures and algorithms, I could easily write a simple hash table on a white board), at least for a pure software development role. And honestly I really wouldn't want a position as a "feature developer" writing yet another REST API.

I really feel my area of expertise, and the one where I would like to specialize further by learning from world class engineers, is system troubleshooting, focused in a world of distributed systems.

My question for HN is: in your mind, what companies/teams would need such a role? And what are the best way to apply to those teams? Also, I am strictly looking for companies who can pay considerably well, my compensation is already decent for the valley (total comp ~200k) and in order to jump ship I would also appreciate an incentive compensation-wise.

Thanks