Technical support engineer is a large category in this family and a major India employer category. It is one of the most accessible routes into a product company and it has a genuine trap, which is worth naming.

• Product depth nobody else has. Support engineers routinely understand edge cases better than the engineers who built the feature.
• Customer exposure from day one, which is the scarce half of every role in this book.
• A visible track record — resolution quality is measurable in a way that junior engineering output often is not.
• Internal mobility. Support is a recognised feeder into TAM, solutions engineering, forward-deployed and product.

The trap is that queue work expands to fill all available time, so two years pass with deep product knowledge and nothing that reads as engineering or ownership on a CV. The way out is deliberate and it is the same for everyone who has made the jump:

• Automate something. A diagnostic script, a triage tool, a self-service answer to your most repeated ticket. This single artefact is what converts support experience into an engineering conversation.
• Own a product area and become the person consulted on it.
• Write. Turn the ticket you answer weekly into documentation, and the deflection is measurable.
• Take one escalation end to end, including the customer communication, and ask to be in the postmortem.
• Say what you want early. Managers move people who have told them where they are going; nobody is promoted out of a queue by being excellent at the queue.