Background: I started my IT career as a "network technician" at a private school in 2012 which was basically help desk with some general sysadmin tasks here and there - install this, fix that, run cable, etc Worked at a data center doing L1/L2 support and more hardware setup. Then I did some contracting for a while, picking up various oddjobs that revolved around sysadmin-esque things, mostly hardware. I have a chronic illness/disability, so the physical requirements were starting to take a toll on my health. I took to getting my Bachelor's degree with the goal of moving into programming.

Longer-story short, I've been doing software engineering for about 3 years now and I don't feel like I'm cut out for it. I have a really hard time wrapping my head around a lot of the business domain/subject matter. I currently work on logistics software, and trying to wrap my head around and read all the cryptic details and schemas for all the different business flows, shipment status codes, order types, etc is exhausting.

In my last job or two, some of my favorite roles were doing stuff like writing automated tests. Deploying new development servers (with a focus on how to automate/reduce manual processes). Creating automated installers so we didn't have to manually deploy. Writing custom plugins to monitor our product licenses. Setting up a CI/CD pipeline.

I know that DevOps, strictly speaking, is a principle/philosophy of work - but this is the only term I'm familiar with to describe what I want to do. Automation of infrastructure & building/supporting the tools/processes that make developer's lives easier.

What are some other job titles I should look for? SRE? Platform Engineer? There seems to be a lot of ambiguity around a lot of these terms, so I'm just curious how to best find what it is that I'm looking for.