Academia as a job - Mathematics

This is more so a curiosity question, as I am still in sixth form, but I was curious what pathways there were for more academic jobs? I am, at heart, more mathematically inclined towards things like pure mathematics, and love the ideas associated with them, even if they are not directly applicable to the real world, and if I could, I would just do that all day, every day. But of course, money exists, so I was wondering if, in the future, there was any way for me to go into a more pure math role, and how I could get there? I am aware there are research and lecturer/teacher roles, but I was curious as to the more wider world of academia.

Academia is I think usually considered to be research (and almost inevitably, teaching at degree level) for the most part. That's what it means to be an academic in a particular subject area - you get your degree, your PhD, do one or more postdocs while trying to get a permanent position somewhere doing that - these normally being things like research/teaching associate roles, lecturer positions, professorships etc.

There are roles within higher education outside of that of course, although often these would be considered as part of the academic administration (in the sense of a political administration), often called "academic related" or similar rather than just "academic" in of themselves. For example research grant coordinators, student pastoral support, admissions tutors, business/contracts/data/IT managers, librarians and archivists etc. Although often some of these roles will be done in part by academics just as another part of their job along with the teaching and research etc (for example student pastoral support, some aspects of admissions, etc).

The thing is though that those roles aren't research roles themselves or teaching roles themselves. So you won't be doing that maths work in those roles, because you'll be organising funding and approving funding requests and so on, or providing pastoral support to students, or managing the day to day running of the department, or doing whatever else - which may be in the maths department of course, but it's not actually maths you're doing day to day.

Essentially, there are lots of different roles in the higher education sector, but if your goal is to be working in that sector and being actually doing your subject area, you pretty much are going down more or less the similar route of degree, PhD, postdoc(s), and trying to get a permanent academic position usually being the long term goal. Of course you might work in one of those academic related roles along the way too and they may in fact give you some quite useful experience on your CV for applying to the permanent academic positions!