Struggling to find options for skillset and stuck in adjacent field? [M31 w/ MSPH]

Hey fellow seekers,

So I have been listening to the Deep Questions Podcast from Cal Newport for a long time and am convinced by his concept of lifestyle engineering - ICYMI: essentially, in counter to the ineffective "follow your passion" narrative, you take the lifestyle you want and work backwards to filter down to career path.

One example he used that I found fascinating was a lawyer who leveraged her experience not to follow the traditional "partner path" for the title and millions at expense of insane work hours and overhead, and instead took on a kind of subject matter expert/consulting role. She worked less and still made plenty, just not millions plenty.

With this in mind, I had a question regarding later career epidemiologists and biostatisticians (I have an MS with just over 7+ YOE): is there a similar pathway to this SME/consulting route in my field(s)? Anything with health data analysis could be considered under this umbrella as well.

I embarrassingly and plainly don't have much connection to the community, since most of my epi work was scattered about in academia and COVID relief jobs when I left for an adjacent tech role that doesn't really use my original skillsets. I feel kind of stuck in my role because it has morphed into more marketing than I expected on hiring, rather than the interesting health data science or analysis I was sold on.

I am hoping to pivot back into the field with my hard-won expertise, but not if it just means I have to go be a director and manage even greater number of people and obligations. Right now it feels like I only qualify for the lower positions but they won't hire me because they have stated that I would probably cost too much; I don't qualify for the leadership roles because again, the pivot described above (and again: not really interested in the manager route and more so the SME route).

Does anyone on here have experience doing something like this?

How did you go about it?

What steps should I take to get there?

Thanks!!