Shifting from data scientist to software engineer

Hi all,
I’m data scientist working in Italy. Even though I am a data scientist I care more about the software engineering part of a data science project than the modelling itself so I want to shift my career to that path, back-end development\data engineering.

I’m currently searching for a job actively but I’m struggling because I can’t seem to convince the hiring managers enough (usually I pass all coding challanges and technical interviews), maybe because they prefer an experienced back-end dev rather than ex data scientist.

Do you have any advice on a shift like this?

Thanks