Patent clerk. And while he certainly was hung up on himself to an extent (in the Isaacson biography, there was a letter that Einstein sent to a professor basically saying that the job should automatically belong to him), it is a little unfair--the fact that he was a Jew had a lot to do with his struggle to get a job in the German academic system.

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman is an imaginative (read fictional) adventure into how Einstein might have come up with his paradigm-making ideas while working as a patent clerk in Bern.. Good coast-to-coast airplane read.