Be a researcher/professor at a university. I couldn't come up with another option.

This is what the experts have to say.

I have a feeling that most competitive programmers would be happier with the mathematical sides of CS, not just "implement our new website".

I don't really know how the situation is in the rest of the world, but at least here in Estonia we have a couple of cryptography firms who happily hire the CS graduates that are bored with webdev-type stuff. It seems like a good option if something like that exists where you live.

Another interesting field is Coding Theory. I'm not an expert of course but I did a project with that group in the university and the overlap with competitive programming was surprisingly big. The assignment I was given was like "we need the best graph with such-and-such properties, can you make some?". In general a lot of combinatorial and algebraic constructions. Also I'm not really familiar with the job market but there are probably at least some jobs in the industry, as I know some big telecom companies have specialists for that stuff.

Obviously it's not going to be like competitive programming where every problem was created around an interesting idea. But work in CS does not need to be "fiddling with implementation".

Maybe a bit off-topic but I am curious to know are there any CPers whose works are different like historian, music, agriculture, biology etc..

Academic research :)

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I think I can write a little bit about that topic. Since I've implemented almost every algorithm I know in my time at companies. I've used/implemented/encountered binary search, shortest paths, union-find, graph decompositions, dynamic programming, suffix arrays, optimization algorithms, geometric algorithms, RANSAC, bounding volume hierarchies, FFT, max-cost-flows, ... But of course my job is not just solving small algorithmic tasks one after another. There is also a lot of stuff around. Working with databases, creating APIs and microservies, GUIs or webapps, containerizing applications and managing deployments, fixing bugs, writing tests, parallelizing things, and, and, and... In fact I'm sure I do a lot more other stuff. But algorithms do come up, regularly.

There are definitely lots of fields and teams that are suited for competitive programming people. Basically everywhere you look are algorithm necessary, even in companies that create websites. But obviously some teams and projects are better suited then others.

There are lots of companies that deal primarily with data structures and algorithms. For instance the companies behind database solutions. There are companies that develop trading algorithms. Search engines. Companies that focus on machine learning, visual computing, block chain, or quantum computing. Companies that deal with optimization problems, or deal with real time applications. Some departments of big companies focus primarily on data structures that other departments use (like in the video game industry, big companies like Google, ...). And many more.

Basically I would advice to you keep your eyes open, interview for different companies, make yourself knows as an algorithm guy, ... There's probably even some teams, and lots of problems, that deal with algorithmic knowledge in your current company right now. Ask around what other teams are doing, discuss with your mentor/teamlead/POs about your tasks and possible other opportunities in the company. There is no shame in saying that you are not happy with your current tasks. The company also wants you to work in a field in which you better fit, and therefore are more enthusiastic and be more productive.

If you are interviewing at new companies, make sure that you also talk a lot about your interests, and ask questions about about what kind of problems they are facing/solving, what different teams are doing, and discuss about what teams would be the best fit for you. Passing the technical interview is only a small part of an interview. It's not just proving to them that you have some basic knowledge, it's also about your getting to know the company, and making sure that you join the best team that fits you perfectly.

One of my previous companies dealt with the automotive industry and worked a lot with computer vision. Although I would say the majority of people had other tasks like creating GUIs, managing databases and network traffic, business logic, creating robot routines, and so on, there were still loads of algorithmic problems. In computer vision and also other tasks, like optimizing orientation of cameras, reducing data streams to the important bits to not overload the analyzer, making analyzer algorithms more efficient, detecting defect data, predicting data in case of temporary sensor malfunctions.

My current company is basically an all-rounder. We create custom software solutions for other companies. Again the majority of the employees deal with classical development, like creating webapps, IOT, business logic, managing databases, ... But there are also projects that deal with efficient processing of satellite data (e.g. in a cooperation with some weather experts), creating custom search engines, analyzing history data records, some visual computing projects, lots of machine learning topics, and much more. All those topics deal with algorithms. You just need to join the correct teams.

But don't expect that joining such a company/team will be the exact same experience as competing in some competitive programming contest. You will deal with other stuff, new technologies, tools, write tests, debug hours or days for bugs, have unclear instructions (sometimes our customers themselves don't know exactly what they want), data will never be correct, often there doesn't exist optimal or efficient algorithms, ...

In my (limited) experience, I think it is important to consider who you are working with in addition to what you are building. I find I work much better with similarly-minded and hardworking individuals than with people who have been hired for rather arbitrary reasons.

If you get a good group together you can make some pretty cool stuff, and if you have smart people in the room you can usually get the 'implementation fiddling' to a minimum.

I am also a student, and have done an internship at a good startup, so here are my thoughts about kinds of jobs available. If someone who actually has been working as a software engineer reads this, please do correct me — it would probably help me make better career decisions.

While I don't care if I am developing something from scratch or contributing to a large existing codebase, I dislike work which is just tedious and not actually challenging. Front-end development is largely unchallenging, and I find most of it boring, and parts involving CSS almost unbearable.

I think there is a challenging aspect to back-end platform once you get to senior positions, where you are involved in the system design for the application, which makes it interesting. I am talking about a scenario where the application must efficiently scale to a large number of users, and where an efficient design is critical. Working on distributed systems seems interesting.

I believe there are also jobs where you must write code for extremely high performance trading platforms. This should be slightly closer to utilizing the skillset of competitive programming.

There is also the field of AI (excluding Machine Learning), where heuristic algorithms need to be developed. But I think these are research positions only.

University Research Assistant and the likes. In Germany the pay for researchers is 'slightly' more than many good local companies (at entry-level) and the work is all about yourself. You can learn/research whatever you like as long as the topic is interesting enough to be approved. No idea about other countries though.

I should add that I originally was interested in being a researcher. But my last summer at research, I wrote several thousand lines of code just to end up finding that there is no way to prove the problem using tools that we have. You can read the sob story here (https://reu.dimacs.rutgers.edu/~aj564/). For all that stress (working like 70 hours a week, in hopes of getting a paper and therefore a good grad school application), it wasn't worth it. So I decided to go to software engineering, and now I am here :/